


Badlands

by jouissant



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Drunkenness, Dystopia, Fights, Frottage, Gun Violence, Hand Jobs, M/M, Prison, Romulans, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-03-26 18:21:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 58,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3859963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a universe where Romulus crushed the Federation under its boot, Spock grows up in the shadow of the Empire and Jim scrabbles off Tarsus IV by the skin of his teeth. By the time fate sees fit to throw them together, Vulcan is a dusty prison colony and Spock an underling in the Romulan guard whose true identity is his greatest secret. When a scrappy, underfed human inmate stages an escape into the black, Spock gives him up for lost...but is he?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this story 18 months ago and it's driving me nuts to have almost 60k of it sitting on my hard drive. I'm cleaning it up and posting what I have by chapter to light a fire under my ass to finish the damn thing. Relevant character and content tags and ratings to be added/changed as necessary. This is a fairly grim story in lots of ways, particularly in the beginning, so please keep that in mind. Thanks to nicodreams and Museaway for their help with this story. <3

**Vulcan, 2238**

Spock is climbing a mountain. It’s red, and impossibly high, its uppermost peak lost in swirls of clouds. You can see this mountain from Spock’s bedroom window if you lean against it and press your nose to the glass, and now Spock and I-Chaya have set out to climb it. 

They say that there was snow here once, all down the mountainside, that the stone scraped it from the clouds and wore it all the year through. That was before the Rihannsu came and stole the sky away. But no matter--Spock and I-Chaya are climbing the mountain, and when they get to the top, perhaps they will find snow. 

“Would you like that, I-Chaya?” 

The carved wooden sehlat in Spock’s hand is not particularly forthcoming. But again, no matter. 

“Indeed!” chirps I-Chaya, his voice high like a bird’s. “I would certainly be amenable to playing in the snow in the event that we discover some!” He leaps excitedly over the scree, his gait improbably light given the furry bulk of his body. 

“Wait!” cries Spock, as he watches I-Chaya bound away beyond a line of man-sized boulders. “I-Chaya, you move too quickly!” I-Chaya’s massive head protrudes from behind a rock, and it seems as if he closes one eye quickly and opens it again. A wink, Spock’s mother calls it. A human gesture. 

Across the cramped room, Spock’s mother looks up from her book and smiles at him. Spock catches her looking. He does not return the smile. His face feels hot, and he slips I-Chaya into his pocket and smooths the deep folds of red bed-linen flat again. He leans down to the foot of his bed and retrieves his PADD. Amanda’s smile fades. 

“We’ll have dinner soon,” she says. “When your father gets home.” 

“What will we eat?” Spock asks, trying not to sound hopeful. 

She sighs. Then, “ _Mashya_ ,” she says brightly, as if they have not consumed _mashya_ in various preparations every evening for the past forty-two days. Spock feels angry. He attempts to suppress it, but he is unsuccessful. He is no longer such a child that her tone of voice, playing at excitement, has the power to cajole and distract him. 

“I am tired of _mashya_ ,” he says. 

His mother takes hold of the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. There are spots of color in her cheeks, livid pink. “Don’t you think I’m tired of it too?” she snaps.  


Spock doesn’t answer her. He stares down at his hands. He thinks of his father, whose arrival is certainly imminent. They sit in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds before Spock’s mother sighs again, slumping slightly into her chair and letting her book fall to the floor. It, like all his mother’s books, is an antique, fashioned of flimsy, brittle paper. It came with her on the transport from Terra when she traveled to Vulcan to marry Spock’s father; she was allowed limited personal effects and brought only a single set of garments in order to accommodate her library. Spock’s father says he does not comprehend her illogical attachment to these physical objects. However, two months previous, he presented Spock’s mother with a bound volume of old Earth poetry to acknowledge the occasion of her birth. His actions are inconsistent. Spock does not understand them. 

Now, his mother has dropped her book. She would never do such a thing were she not greatly compromised, and based on the available evidence, only Spock can be the cause. The realization causes a distinct sensation of heaviness in Spock’s solar plexus.

“Spock?” 

Spock looks up. His mother holds out a hand, and he goes to her. She pulls him onto her lap as she did when he was very small and kisses the top of his head. Spock turns his face to her chest and lets out a breath against her cloak. “I am sorry,” he mumbles into the fabric. 

Her arms tighten around him. “I am too,” she says. Spock tucks his head beneath her chin, and they sit in silence once more. 

“What happened to the real I-Chaya?” Spock asks. It is a question he has been turning over in his mind for months now. 

“You know what happened,” his mother says quietly. “He fell ill one night. There was nothing your father could do.” 

“Why did you not wake me?” 

“Spock--”

Spock sits up, pulling back from the comforting clasp of his mother’s arms and looking into her face. “Father killed I-Chaya with his phaser, did he not?”

Her left cheek twitches. “Spock! Your father would never--”

“Do not lie,” Spock says. His mother purses her lips, a little puff of air escaping them. He knows that he has won, to the extent such a macabre topic can yield a thing like victory. Her eyes leave his face, finding a dark corner of their grubby common room. His parents try, and Spock helps, but they are too many in too small a space. There is always some clod of red dirt, some crumb. 

“We couldn’t spare the food,” his mother says, still looking at anything but him. 

“You could have released him into the desert!” Spock cries, aghast that his parents overlooked so obvious a solution. “That is his native environment. He could have hunted, made a home up in the foothills.” 

“Spock, I-Chaya’s home was here, with us. It had been since he was a cub. He was tame; he had never hunted a meal a day in his life. How long would he have survived? Even if he weren’t killed by a _le-matya_ or some other wild animal, he’d have starved out there.” 

Spock falls silent. His mother’s logic is sound, and Spock does not know whether that makes him feel better or worse. “Father was merciful,” he says finally. 

His mother presses her mouth to Spock’s temple. He can feel her small smile. “Yes,” she says. “It was not easy for him. He loved I-Chaya just as--”

“He did not. Father is Vulcan,” he says, shaking his head decisively. “He does not love.” 

A strange look passes over his mother’s face at that, but she schools her features nearly as deftly as his father does, and it is gone. “All right,” she says, in the same too-bright tone of voice she used to announce their dinner menu. She eases Spock down onto his feet. “Come,” she says. “Talae brought over a packet of spice mix. We’ll add it to the _mashya_ ; I don’t think it’ll be half bad.” 

His father returns home covered in a fine coat of rust-colored dust and sits wearily at the table, his normally rigid posture slack with exhaustion. He coughs more red dust into his flannel. Spock watches his mother watch his father, her eyes full of worry. She says nothing as she slides a steaming cup of tea across the table. 

“Thank you,” his father says, when he has recovered his voice. 

The food is, in fact, only one-quarter bad, although Spock finds this rating system imprecise at best. Despite his earlier protests, he does not particularly care. The room is pleasantly warm, his mother occasionally blotting beads of sweat from her brow. When his belly is full he allows himself an indulgent moment to pretend it is full of something other than _mashya_ , that they sit around the table in the old house in Shi’Kahr, that his father has returned from his office in the city and not from the rusty bowels of a dilithium mine. 

His mother rises from the table, her chair scraping across the stone floor. She appears excited, and Spock finds her expression contagious in spite of himself. “What is it?” he asks. 

“Just wait,” she says and disappears into the makeshift larder, a corner of the kitchen partitioned off by a bedsheet. She returns a moment later bearing a large plate and an even larger smile. 

_“Savas?”_

Spock turns to face his father. It appears Spock is not the only one affected by his mother’s excitement. Sarek raises an eyebrow at him and turns back to Spock’s mother and her plate, laden with rotund salmon-colored globefruit. Spock’s mouth waters at the sight of it. 

“Where did you get it?” he asks. 

Spock’s mother raises an eyebrow of her own. “I have my ways,” she says. Most likely she procured it in trade at the market, where the Vulcans are left to scrap over pickings that the _Rihannsu_ leave behind. With credits stretched thin and prices exorbitant for the most basic necessities, a thriving barter system has sprung up. In recent months, however, such luxuries as _savas_ have been few and far between. They fall on the fruit; even Sarek tacitly condones the fervency with which Amanda peels it, breaks it apart to send a spray of juice and pith into the air above the table. She raises her fingers to her lips, laughing. 

Later, Spock is sent to bed after an hour spent bent over his PADD working a set of equations. He lies awake puzzling over a particularly difficult one, the numbers and symbols hanging luminous in his mind’s eye. His parents sit at the table conversing in low tones, a glowlamp set between them like an overlarge firefly. Spock closes his eyes and tries not to listen to what they say. He fails, catching his name in the flow of conversation, and is given over to curiosity. He scoots to the edge of the bed, subtly attempting to take up a more advantageous position. The bed creaks, and his parents stop talking. He can almost feel his mother craning her neck to look, but he lies motionless and slows his breathing. After a moment, she starts to speak again. 

“Anyway, I don’t like it,” she says. 

“There is no guarantee it will come to pass,” Sarek says. “The House of Satok is exacting in their standards.” 

“He’s not good enough, is that what you’re saying?” 

“Amanda--”

“No, that _is_ what you’re saying,” she says, her voice biting. 

“I am saying nothing,” Sarek says. “I am merely alluding to potential obstacles.” 

Spock’s mother sighs. “Who’s to say this is even a good idea?” she says. “Look around you, Sarek. Look at this world we live in. Maybe it’s not so--not so logical to bind yourself to another person in times like these.” 

“Would you choose to face these days alone, my wife?” There’s a softness, a hesitation to his words now that Spock has never heard before. He wants desperately to open his eyes, to look at his father’s face and see if it matches his voice, but he knows his eyes will catch in the glowlight. 

He hears their bodies shift, the brush of cloth against skin. Perhaps they are embracing. 

“We will call on Satok, as requested,” Sarek says after some time. “There is no harm in their meeting. Should we find their minds compatible, that would be enough to silence any protest.” Spock is unsure, but he thinks he hears Sarek sigh. “They are of considerable means, Amanda,” he says. “Even by current standards.” 

Spock’s mother stands, her chair rasping across the floor once more. “I’m not sure how long that will matter.” The lamp goes out, and although Spock does not quite comprehend her meaning, he cannot stop the chill that spreads across his prone body despite the closeness of the room.

***

In the days that follow, Spock does not dwell on his parents’ whispered conversation. He attends school, a less formal affair than it might once have been, conducted primarily via PADD rather than the learning pods Spock hears tell of at the Romulan school. Still, there is a sizeable collection of academic texts accessible through a makeshift digital library, and they take turns utilizing the energy allotment to ensure their devices’ batteries are sufficiently charged to allow for home study. One afternoon, Spock’s grade level is attempting a particularly challenging geometric proof when the sound of a massive explosion rips through the air. They cease their activity immediately and run outside, heedless of their instructor’s reproach. A massive beam of light issues from the base of a spidery black structure that has lately appeared on the horizon halfway to Shi’Kahr. Spock is predisposed against the structure, as it mars the view of the mountains from his window. The light appears to surge into the very earth, and Spock wonders if he is imagining the faint vibration that seems to crawl up into him from the soles of his feet, from the ground he stands on.

“What is it?” asks one of Spock’s classmates. 

“It is a drill,” says T’Vess, their instructor. She is slim and dark-eyed and enjoys cataloguing desert insects in her free time, a fact she shared with Spock while dabbing at his split lip on the day he was sent home for fighting Stonn. Spock finds her eminently competent. He looks up at her face. It is pale, and her mouth is slightly pinched. 

“A drill?” Spock says. “Why is it necessary to drill when we mine dilithium already?” 

“The mines run dry,” she says, her tone strange. “The _Rihannsu_ strive ever deeper.” 

There are no further questions. The students stand in a loose semi-circle, watching the light stream into the desert until it becomes evident that no greater dramatics are forthcoming. As they return to the classroom, Spock approaches T’Vess and tugs lightly on the long hem of her tunic. 

“What will happen when there’s nothing left?” Spock asks. He does not know why he asks the question, only that it is suddenly present in his mind and his belly churns as he waits for the answer. But T’Vess only shakes her head slowly. The tightness has not left her face. 

“Resume your geometry,” she says to Spock. He complies. As the day wears on, he notices that her eyes do not stray long from the window. 

Three days after that, Spock returns home from school to find both his parents waiting for him. It is unusual to find his father home this early in the afternoon, and Spock is immediately disquieted. 

“What has happened?” he asks. 

His parents share a glance, and Spock immediately remembers their earlier conversation. 

“Are we going to T’Pring’s residence?” he asks. 

His parents look at one another again. Spock’s mother appears to have a headache. She pinches the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “This one’s all yours,” she says to Sarek, walking back inside the house.

Spock does not comprehend her human colloquialisms, but it appears his father does, for he steps closer to Spock and gestures at the low stone bench just to the right of the doorway. 

They sit together. “Are you well, Father?” Spock asks. 

“Spock, I must ask for your patience,” Sarek says gravely. “This is a matter of the utmost importance, and I trust you can be relied upon to hear me speak of it with a man’s ears, not a child’s.” 

Spock nods, something like pride swelling in his chest. He stifles the bloom of emotion immediately. “Understood,” he says. 

“In your studies, have you come upon the term _kun-oot-la_?” 

Spock shakes his head.

Sarek exhales slowly. “The _kun-oot-la_ ,” he intones, “is a bonding ceremony. Less than a marriage, and more than a betrothal.” Spock has the impression that these are not his father’s words. 

“Bonding?” Spock repeats. “Am I to bond with T’Pring?” 

He swallows. The thought makes him feel uneasy. He remembers the day he fought Stonn--or, more accurately, the day Stonn’s blow to the face left Spock prostrate and disoriented for a duration of nine minutes before T’Vess found him. As he lay in the dirt, blood from his nose soaking into the sand beneath his face, he watched T’Pring’s boots as she shifted from foot to foot, perhaps weighing the merits of helping Spock up. In the end, she did not. Stonn called to her, and the boots exited Spock’s field of vision. 

Sarek speaks again, returning Spock to the present moment. “Does this trouble you?” 

“Will we be … will we be married? Like you and mother?” 

“Perhaps later,” Sarek says. 

“Perhaps?” 

“There are other eventualities.” Sarek shifts minutely in his seat, and Spock is struck with the distinct impression that his father is expressing discomfort. It is most unusual. 

“You did not know of the _kun-oot-la_ ,” he says. “What of _pon farr_?” 

Spock’s face feels hot. He does not know much of _pon farr_. Earlier in the academic year, he overheard a pair of older children discussing it, although their description was so ludicrous it cannot possibly have been accurate. _Pon farr_ seems a dangerous, tantalizing mystery to Spock, as do most things adults strive to keep from children.

“No, father,” he says. It seems the safer answer. 

“Very well,” Sarek says. “It will perhaps be challenging to furnish you with an adequate explanation at this stage of your development, but I will attempt it nonetheless. Certain aspects of the description may be difficult for you to comprehend.” 

“I will understand,” Spock says hotly. 

Sarek glances sidelong at him, and Spock detects a hint of amusement in the planes of his father’s face. “No,” Sarek says. “I very much doubt you will.” 

He is correct. 

“What if I do not wish to bond with T’Pring, when the Time comes?” Spock asks carefully. It is the least uncomfortable question he can think to ask after Sarek’s explanation. 

“It is likely that your wishes will be somewhat subsumed to the tumult of the _plak tow_ ,” Sarek says. 

“After, then?” 

“Following the onset of the plak tow, your initial bonding will be consummated via a second ceremony and physical union.” 

Spock cannot prevent the rush of blood to his face at this. He hangs his head so that his father will not see but notes that, mercifully, Sarek is looking in the opposite direction. 

“Afterwards,” Sarek continues, “it is unlikely that you will find T’Pring wanting, nor she you. Your minds will be joined, two halves of one whole.” 

“Forever,” Spock says. 

“Until death.” 

Spock cannot see the difference. 

“And if I do not do not join with T’Pring, when I have this fever,” Spock says. “I will die?” His voice sounds very small, even to himself. 

“There are alternative measures for unbonded individuals,” Sarek says. “But the _kun-oot-la_ renders them unnecessary. It is most logical.” 

Spock understands that Sarek intends him to find reassurance in this appeal to logic. He attempts to do so, with limited success. 

They travel to T’Pring’s home in the aircar. Spock tries to quell his excitement. They have not utilized the vee in months; their scant power allotment does not allow for it. Spock presses his hands to the rear passenger window and watches the landscape fly past in a red smear of mountains and desert. Their destination is the far side of Shi’Kahr, and as they slow to pass through the city, Spock watches the crowds of _Rihannsu_ swarming the streets of his birthplace, his former home. He feels anger at the sight, although if he is honest with himself it is increasingly difficult for him to recall the time before the invasion. They look well-fed, careless and happy, and Spock cannot stop himself from staring at the overt displays of emotion he sees upon even so cursory an observation. A child, a girl about his age, is eating an apple. She leans close to her companion, throws back her head and laughs. 

“Spock,” Amanda says, twisting in her seat to catch his eye. “Didn’t you bring something to work on?” 

Reluctantly, Spock drops his gaze and picks up his PADD, resolving to work for the remainder of the journey.

Standing before T’Pring’s door, Amanda drops to her knees before him and straightens his robes, combs her fingers through his bangs. He attempts to move away from her, and she swats at his arm but leans in to kiss his cheek anyway. “You’ll be fine,” she says in an undertone, as if she isn’t speaking to him at all. 

Then the door swings open, and T’Pring’s father stands before them. Somehow he seems more Vulcan than even Sarek, and Spock attempts to quash the almost immediate fluttering this engenders in the vicinity of his stomach. He looks down at Spock measuringly, then raises his hand in the _ta’al._

“Greetings,” he says to Spock’s parents. Then, “Greetings, Spock cha’ Sarek.” He gestures down a narrow passageway. “Follow me.” 

The House of Satok is as ancient as the mountains themselves, and fittingly its seat is carved into the very stone of the foothills outside Shi’Kahr. The passageway opens out into what must have once been a natural cavern but which now has been adapted to house T’Pring’s family. The room is large, and twin doors indicate a suite of rooms beyond it. Spock is struck with a sudden pang of envy, immediately followed by the flush of embarrassment. Across the room, T’Pring stands alongside her mother, and the two of them watch Spock as if they know his thoughts. 

“T’Shara, T’Pring,” Sarek says, offering the ta’al. “I trust we find you in good health.” 

T’Pring’s mother inclines her head politely. “And you as well,” she says. “Please, sit. Refresh yourselves.” 

She nods at T’Pring, who leaves her side and walks purposefully to the open kitchen, returning with a heavily-laden platter. On it rests a basket of _kap_ and a sweating pitcher surrounded by six metal tumblers. Spock barely restrains a gasp. He has not seen freshly-baked _kap_ in over a year, and not only is there a golden-brown roll for each of them, but alongside the basket rests a shallow ceramic bowl. In its center sits a pale, creamy cube of butter. It is small, but nonetheless it is there. 

Spock’s mother turns to look at him, and Spock folds his hands in his lap dutifully. He waits until T’Pring and her family have served themselves, then passes the basket to his mother and father. His mother declines her roll, and Spock does not miss the quizzical angle of his father’s head when he notices. But he does not trouble himself overly much, because at last he is closing eager fingers around the _kap_ and breaking it in two to release a little cloud of steam. He sinks a knife into the butter, coming away with less than he wants, and spreads it across the warm roll. He eats in measured bites and, as the adults talk and pass around the pitcher of _kvass_ , tries not to stare at the crusts T’Pring’s family leave on their plates. 

After they’ve eaten, Satok straightens. “Perhaps we should attend to our stated business,” he says. 

“Indeed,” Sarek says. 

“T’Shara,” Satok says, nodding at his wife. She rises and goes into the kitchen, coming back a moment later with a pair of small glasses in her hands. They are the size of egg-cups. She hands one to Spock and the second to T’Pring. Spock is immediately assaulted with a cloying odor. His eyes feel dangerously close to watering. 

“ _D’lechu_ juice?” Spock’s mother says suddenly. “What is this? They’re not bonding today!” 

“Amanda,” says Sarek. 

“Calm yourself,” Satok says. “We merely seek to ascertain their compatibility. They are unstudied in the necessary mental disciplines; the drink will aid in opening their minds.” 

Spock’s mother shakes her head. It is barely perceptible, but her disapproval is evident. Across the low table, T’Pring and T’Shara sit expressionless as statues. Spock wishes his mother had not spoken. 

Sarek nods at Satok. “Your logic is sound.” 

“Very well,” says Satok. The plates and glasses are cleared away, and Satok indicates that Spock should come around the table and sit beside T’Pring on the low settee. 

“T’Shara studied with the adepts, in the time before the invasion, he says. “She will oversee the joining of their minds.” 

T’Shara gestures at their cups. “Drink.”

Spock looks at T’Pring. Her face is appropriately blank, but he thinks he can see the barest hint of trepidation in her eyes. He looks directly into them as he drinks the juice down. 

He is unable to stop himself from spluttering; the drink is like fire in his throat. He notes that T’Pring does the same and feels a measure of relief that she is not unaffected. When he tries to recall the incident later, this will be the last thing he clearly remembers. 

Almost immediately, Spock is overcome with a stifling warmth, as if the burning sensation of the liquor in his mouth has spread to every part of him. He lets his mouth fall open, as if doing so could release some of the heat that threatens to burn him up from the inside out. Across from him, he senses rather than sees T’Pring doing the same. He feels a hand on his face, so much steadier than he feels. He thinks he will slide from the settee and ignite on the floor, but it’s as if the hand has anchored him in space. He hears muttered words, and then the world explodes. He is looking upon himself, and with a start he realizes he is seeing himself through T’Pring’s eyes. He feels himself assessed and catalogued. 

_His eyes. They are a human’s eyes, are they not? So easily do they broadcast his emotions._

Spock blinks reflexively. From T’Pring’s vantage point, he attempts to discern what she means, but he cannot. His eyes appear just as hers do, wide and brown, pupils dilated. As he thinks this, there’s a painful scraping sensation in his head, a kind of mental scoff. Abruptly, he is cast out of T’Pring’s mind, slamming back into his own alone with nauseating force. 

Spock reels, slipping off the settee onto his hands and knees and gagging. All at once, he feels strong hands grip him under the arms and haul him upright. Amanda cradles him against her like a baby, his limbs flopping uselessly as she strides from the room and then from the house altogether. She’s scarcely gotten them outside before she deposits Spock on the ground without ceremony. He rolls onto his hands and knees again and retches, emptying his stomach onto the red dirt. He gasps against the waves of nausea, aware that over the sounds of his vomiting his mother is muttering to herself, utilizing language she has expressly forbidden in their home. 

“Fucking Vulcans and their goddamn ceremonial _bullshit_ \--sorry, Spock, I’m so sorry, but when I see the way they look at you I want to punch something.”

She does, slamming her fist into a soft drift of sand that has come to rest against the wall of the house. Spock drags the back of his hand across his mouth and sits back on his heels, watching Amanda with wide eyes. She glances over at the door and narrows her eyes. 

“Do you want to go back in there?” 

Spock shakes his head. “I do not.” 

“That’s fine,” she says. “Go wait in the car.” 

Spock crawls into his seat in the vee and slumps against the window. He closes his eyes. Presently, he hears footsteps and the slam of doors, feels the vee sink slightly as his parents climb inside. The door on his mother’s side slams, and when Spock opens his eyes he sees that his father has not yet touched the wheel, instead sitting for a moment in meditation.

Amanda turns to him in the back seat, eyes red-rimmed. She has something in her hands, wrapped in a handkerchief, and she offers it to him. He takes the little bundle, opens it carefully. It’s the last _kap_ roll, and the inside is spread with butter. 

They do not speak of the incident again. Spock is unsure what precisely unfolded, but he is certain now that he will not complete the _kun-oot-la_ , that he will not be bonded to T’Pring. Although he cannot verbalize it, he knows with a sickening certainty that the cause lies with his mixed genetics. 

When he sees T’Pring in the schoolyard, he feels a troubling mixture of anger, despair, and relief. None of these emotions befit a Vulcan, and he wonders if his agemates can see them written on his face as T’Pring claimed she could. Spock spends long minutes before the mirror in the lavatory, watching his own face as he deliberately provokes various emotional responses. Perhaps it is a symptom of his condition that he cannot see a single outward manifestation of any of them. 

Prior to the disastrous visit to her family home, T’Pring treated Spock in a manner approaching utter indifference. Now, however, it seems that she and Spock do not exist on the same plane, that Spock cannot even disturb the air around her. He would not mind, except that somehow when her gaze passes through him he tends to think of dying. Stonn follows Spock halfway home one afternoon, until Spock finally tires of the shadow dogging his steps and breaks into a run. He does not enjoy being punched in the face, and an additional injury would cause his mother to worry. 

Twelve days after this, T’Vess is conscripted to work in the mines, and the school is shut down altogether. 

Spock continues his studies independently. His mother instructs him in Standard, High Vulcan, mathematics, and rhetoric. Spock conducts his own crude chemistry experiments, and tries not to think of what was possible in the makeshift laboratory at school. When his father returns home in the evenings, he lectures to Spock on Vulcan history. He pays particular attention to those facets regarding the _Rihannsu_ , how they chose to spurn the teachings of Surak and left the planet behind many thousands of years ago. 

_We were as one,_ Spock thinks. _Why did they leave? And why did they return?_

 

**2241**

Something is happening. 

It takes him far too long to realize what it is. It is morning, and Spock is roused from sleep by a creeping unease. He opens his eyes and listens, which is when he recognizes the source: a sound. Or, more precisely, the absence of sound. He kicks free of the blankets and rises, crossing to the window and looking out over the plain. While he has not forgotten the appearance of the first drill, three years on he would be hard pressed to recall Vulcan without them. Where one drill stood, there are now dozens. Their photon beams shoot unchecked from black slabs of metal, platforms manned only by _Rihannsu_. The beams flow into the earth relentlessly, stabbing puncture wounds into Vulcan’s red flesh, filling the air with their crush and buzz. But not today, Spock realizes. Today, they have fallen silent. He always expected to find relief in it, but he doesn’t. 

As he steps away from the window, an object on the floor catches his eye. It is the tiny wooden sehlat he named after I-Chaya. It is now lodged in a crevice in the floor, covered over with debris. He kneels and plucks it from the stone, cradling it in his hand like an egg and blowing it free of dust. 

His mother comes home soon afterwards. 

“I was at Talae’s,” she says. “The mines are closing.” 

Spock cannot stifle a gasp. He resolves to meditate for an additional ten minutes this evening to account for it. “How has she learned this?” he asks. 

“She was in the city,” Spock’s mother says. “The Romulan market. Everyone was talking about it, apparently. Looks as if the well has finally run dry.”

“They did not mine for water,” Spock says, brow furrowed. 

“I mean the dilithium’s gone,” his mother says. “Terran expression. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that your father won’t be slaving away underground any longer.” 

Spock finds something troubling about her manner, but he cannot put a name to it. Sure enough, Spock’s father returns home early in the afternoon, his clothes stained red for the last time. His mother puts on an emotional display that causes Spock to avert his eyes, leaping at Sarek and kissing his cheek. She attempts the same with Spock, generous in her state of celebration, but he shrugs away. Even without the press of her mind when they touch, he can guess at her thoughts. She believes, as others do, that when the planet’s resources are exhausted the _Rihannsu_ will leave them. Once, Spock might have believed the same, but if he is honest, he can no longer imagine Vulcan free from the shadow of her erstwhile cousin. He watches his mother prepare the midday meal, smiling like a child, and feels much older than his eleven years. 

After lunch, he leaves the house and walks up the road. Talae waves to him as he passes her home, and he nods in return. Spock’s mother has become fast friends with her, while Spock and his father have been more reticent. They are Vulcan, Spock thinks, drawing himself up a little as he walks. He finds it odd that his mother should consider Talae and Nakar independently of their fellow colonizers. They may claim sympathy with Vulcan’s plight, but they are _Rihannsu_ nonetheless. 

“There are others,” Talae told Spock once. “Others like us, who seek peace with your people.” 

They sat at the table eating _balkra_ , the first fresh vegetables they had managed to procure in weeks. Spock remembers feeling a prick of irritation at Talae as she blithely refilled her bowl. After all, she was--she is-- free to take her pick of the markets in Shi’Kahr. Spock’s mother would say that credits are tight for all. Spock knows this to be true and is irritated anyway. 

“If there are others, why do they not come? Why do they not speak for us?” 

“Spock,” said his mother warningly. “Could you fetch me another cup of tea?” 

Now, as he walks along the road, he thinks of walking all the way into Shi’Kahr, of finding the laughing girl of three years prior. He sees Romulan children occasionally; they come into the desert to forage for plants or to hunt game. They have never spoken to him, and Spock is forbidden to engage them. There are rumors of a Vulcan boy who spoke back to a one who threw a rock at him. He was taken by the authorities for questioning and did not return to his parents. 

“There is no evidence that this story has any basis in fact,” Spock said, when he was restricted from walking in the desert shortly after word of it reached his parents’ ears. 

“Regardless,” Sarek said, his tone brooking no argument. 

When Spock returns to the house, his parents are seated at the table. There is a strange tension about the place, as if a storm has recently cleared. It lasts until after dinner, when Spock’s mother goes into the fresher and does not come out. Sarek walks outside and sits heavily on the stone bench, and after a moment’s hesitation Spock elects to join him. 

Sarek stares off at the mountains. When he begins to speak, he does so without turning to look at Spock. _“Kaiidth_ ,” he says. “There is no logic in imagining otherwise. However, I find I am hard pressed to avoid comparisons between my own early life and yours.” 

“Father--” 

“Were it within my power to change our current circumstances, to enable you to exercise your full potential, I would do so,” he says. 

Spock’s mouth falls open, but he quickly recovers and shuts it again. As his father says, there is no logic to yearning for an alternate reality. That Sarek should admit to it, in however small a measure, is utterly surprising to Spock. He does not know how to respond. He exhales slowly. In his peripheral vision, he sees his father turn to look at him. 

“Do you share your mother’s belief that the _Rihannsu_ will leave us?” 

Spock hesitates. “No,” he says quietly. He realizes that this is the first time he has expressly stated it. Part of him instantly wishes he could recant. 

Sarek nods. “I concur,” he says. “Though I have not--” He does not complete his statement, but Spock feels certain he was going to say that he has not shared this opinion with Spock’s mother. Spock wonders if his father knows more than just rumors. Failing to disclose facts in order to appeal to emotional security--that Sarek should do this is unfathomable to Spock. He thinks of a long-forgotten conversation with his mother. _Father is Vulcan. He does not love._ Spock had been so certain then. A child’s certainty, he thinks. 

Is this what it means to love? To protect another from the truth, whether or not it changes the outcome? He wants to speak these thoughts aloud, ask his father to clarify, but he cannot make his mouth form the words. Spock and Sarek sit in silence for a long time, and when Sarek rises and walks into the house Spock does not call him back.

***

In the end, the _Rihannsu_ do leave. Well, some of them do. But it isn’t in the way Spock’s mother imagined.

It’s midmorning, and Spock is dozing. He forces himself to sleep long hours these days; it’s preferable to being awake and hungry, although he chafes against such lassitude. He is roused entirely as Sarek strides into the room and addresses him. 

“Rise and dress,” he says simply, his voice taut. “Pack your things.” 

“What has happened?” Spock asks as he complies. He looks up at his father. Sarek’s expression is unreadable, and something about the set of his body makes Spock think he must be shielding more than usual. Sarek gives the slightest shake of his head, and in this moment Spock knows. Spock’s mother sits at the table, her hands clasping a mug of hot water. Spock wonders if she knows too. 

They take him down the road, to Talae and Nakar’s. Spock has a bundle of clothing tucked under his arm, wrapped in his quilt. Along with the carved sehlat, it is one of the only possessions Spock is certain came with them from Shi’Kahr. He tells himself he was wise to bring it, that it may prove practical somehow. If, that night and many nights afterward, he lies with the soft cloth pressed to his face and breathes deep as if he could thus conjure the airy stone rooms where his life began, no one will be the wiser. 

Spock’s mother sees Talae and both begin to cry. As always, he finds the sight of such blatant emotion strange on Talae’s face. They are our cousins, he thinks. How can we look so much alike and be so different? He looks away, to Nakar’s offered _ta’al_ , his fingers spread awkwardly. 

“Take Spock’s things inside,” says Nakar, and Talae complies, accepting the bundle of fabric from Spock and taking it into the house, wiping at her eyes as she goes. Nakar looks at Sarek. “You should go, if you mean to make for the spaceport. I’ll warn you, it won’t be easy. They’ve got their orders just like I’ve got mine, and they’ll not be so ready to defy them.” 

“Thank you,” says Sarek simply. “We are in your debt.” 

The look Nakar gives him says he doesn’t think he is likely to be repaid. Spock hopes his mother hasn’t seen. 

“Amanda,” says Sarek. 

Spock lets his hands fall to his sides. His palms are clammy. His mother approaches him almost hesitantly, as if afraid to disturb something. She clutches at the front of his robes, pulls him toward her, and Spock suddenly feels very small. 

“I love you,” she says. Her eyes are shining, and she smells of wet wool. Spock’s throat feels tight, but his father is watching and his father is Vulcan and Spock is Vulcan and Spock _will not_ cry. She grabs him to her, and he thinks suddenly of the day she carried him from T’Pring’s stone floor to vomit over the threshold. The memory trips some wire in him, and he lets fly a single peal of too-high laughter. His mother grips tighter. Spock can hear the hum of a vee in the distance, away down the road towards Shi’Kahr. 

“I love you,” his mother says again. “Don’t forget.”

***

They lock him in his room.

It isn’t his room, of course, but Talae’s study. They have converted it into a makeshift bedroom for him, and Spock places his quilt carefully atop the narrow pallet on the floor. There’s a plate of food on the desk across from him, _kap_ and _plomeek_ stew and a creamy pat of butter he is certain is the largest he has ever seen. His stomach clenches and growls audibly, but Spock does not eat. He sits on the bed, legs crossed, and he waits. Eventually, he brings his knees up to tuck beneath his chin. And still he waits, though unsure exactly what it is he’s waiting for. 

Night falls, and it begins gradually. At first, Spock believes he is merely experiencing a delayed emotional response to his parents’ departure. If the rumors are true, if the Romulans have tired of their tenure on Vulcan, then Spock estimates the likelihood of his parents returning at less than fifteen percent. The number makes him swallow, and tears prick at his eyes. He is alone in the room with no one to mark them, but he blinks them back anyway. And then he feels it, a plucking sensation in his head, a twinge like the snapping of a lyre string. It’s uncomfortable at first, then painful, and it is accompanied by a despair the likes of which Spock has never before experienced. All at once, he’s awash in it, vast swaths of abject sadness grey and drippy like watercolor across his mind. When the fear comes, it stabs red across this dreary field and it feels like lightning. 

Spock scrabbles into the corner, some deeply animalistic part of him believing he can hide from it, claw dirt atop his curled form and remain buried until it passes. But as time goes on, Spock begins to forget that ending is a state it’s possible for anything to reach, let alone the storm in his head. 

“Please,” he cries at the door. It’s not entirely flush with the wall, and he can see the play of light on the floor in the corridor. A shadow moves over it, and he knows someone’s there. “Please,” he says again. “Please let me out.” He needs to get out, he decides. He needs to run from the house and out into the road and keep going until he finds them, finds where they’re dying and joins them. 

“They are leaving me,” he moans to Talae on the other side of the door. “They are all gone, all of them. Please, you have to let me go too! You can’t make me stay here alone!” 

“Spock,” says Talae, her voice thick with tears. “You must listen. Your parents wanted more for you than that, they--”

“I do not believe you! Mother would not leave me--she would--” 

Terror and sadness lance through his head. His words disintegrate into a pained howl against the grain of the door, and Spock is too agitated to trouble himself with things like embarrassment or shame at the gross emotional display. He screams himself hoarse, clawing at the door, and when his throat and hands are too sore to continue he slumps against it bonelessly. Eventually he drops into the sleep of the exhausted, and when he awakes he thinks it a mercy. Because although his parental bonds are broken, rent and sparking like cut livewires, Spock does not remember feeling it happen. 

He lies in the dim, close room for a long time. His innate sense of time seems off-kilter. Talae comes and goes, wiping his brow with a cool, damp cloth and spooning broth into Spock’s mouth when he’ll let her. He hears voices, the muffled crump of faraway explosions. But he does not ask about them, and Talae does not offer. It’s difficult to sit up; equilibrium fails him and his head swims, dizzy with emptiness when he had never noticed it full before. So he stops trying to right himself, crawls over to the pallet and slides back down into unconsciousness.

The next time he wakes up, his stomach is growling again. He sits up slowly. The buzzing silence in his head remains, and a swirl of nausea threatens to dampen his hunger. He swallows down the sour taste in his mouth and gets shakily to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall to steady himself. 

Talae’s head appears around the doorway. “Spock?” she says. “I thought I heard a noise.” 

“Would it be possible--could I have something to eat?” 

Talae smiles. Her features are broad, her body soft. She is nothing like Spock’s mother. But he allows her to fetch him a plate of vegetable stew and a roll, and to sit by him while he eats. She reaches out to him as if to smooth his bangs from his forehead, and he freezes, drawing in a breath like a startled animal. But then he relaxes, letting her comb her fingers through his dirty hair. Later, Spock will remember this as the moment he decided to live. Or, perhaps more accurately, the moment he decided not to die. If he closes his eyes, he can see his mother’s hands grabbing at his chest. 

_I love you. Don’t forget._

***


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tarsus IV, 2248

Tarsus IV, 2248

Jim hauls off and hocks a wad of spit into the guard’s face. The guard grimaces, arm twitching toward his face like he’d wipe it off but for the inconvenient fact that he’s just caught Jim in the wheat stores and is supposed to be detaining him. Jim takes advantage, that subtle redirection of force giving him the leeway he needs to wrench free of the guard and dart around the side of the warehouse. 

The guard yells something in Romulan and follows him, his boots crunching in the parched dirt and skidding out as he tries to get up to speed. 

There are advantages to being starved half to death. Jim’s light, though his heart pounds fit to burst as he feints one way and then dives another, rolling under a parked vee just in the nick of time and watching the guard clomp heavily by him. He tries to keep his breathing slow and quiet, but the air can’t get into his lungs fast enough. The running and the thin atmo have it in for him, and black spots dance across his field of vision. _Fuck_ , he thinks. _Fuck fuck fuck_. 

He didn’t make it away with much this time. A bunch of that nasty standard-issue hardtack they hand out in the ration packets and a sackful of actual wheat his aunt can try to magic into something resembling real bread. It’s almost more worth it for the chase than the loot, or maybe Jim’s just too far gone to care. He waits under the vee for a long time, until the light starts to die, and then he slides out carefully and makes for home. It takes longer than he expected; he’s tired, and half the streetlights on the way to his aunt’s house seem to be broken these days, so he has to pick his way over the dried, clotted mud to keep from falling on his face. The roads on this side of the settlement are barely walkable, let alone driveable. By the time he gets home, he can see a shadowy form pacing in front of the gate. Sam, by the looks of it, and it figures he’s pissed as hell. 

“Ow!” Jim says as Sam whacks him on the arm. “What’s that for?” 

“That’s for taking forever to get back and scaring the shit out of me,” Sam says. “I had to come out here and wait so Aunt Nancy wouldn’t start freaking. She thinks you’re over at the Rileys’ working on the vegetable garden.” 

“We threw in the towel on that two weeks ago,” Jim says. The water rations weren’t stretching far enough, even with Jim switching entirely to sonics. 

Sam sighs. “I know.” 

Jim looks up at the flickering streetlamps. “Aren’t they ever going to fix these things?” 

“No way, man,” Sam says. “Jim, you just broke into food stores so we’d all have a shot at enough to go around. You think the Romulans give a shit about the lighting, or about us having passable roads? Do you think they give a shit about us at all? This is a failed experiment, just like your vegetable garden. I give it six months before--” He cuts himself off with a sharp shake of his head.

“Before what? Sam?” 

Sam shakes his head. “Forget it.” He gestures at Jim’s pack. “What’d you get?” 

Jim hands it over. “Those gross biscuit things,” he says. “Oh, and some wheat; maybe Aunt Nancy can make that flatbread stuff again.” 

In the dim light from the house, Jim watches Sam’s face as he looks it all over. He’s disappointed, Jim can tell. But then he smiles, and Jim’s always thought Sam was a pretty good actor, because if he hadn’t seen that dark look pass over him a second ago, he’d have bought it hook, line, and sinker. 

“Good work,” Sam says. He cuffs Jim on the shoulder again, but it’s softer this time. “C’mon, let’s go in.” 

Aunt Nancy must realize that the vegetable garden is a fiction, because it’s not like the Rileys would’ve given Jim a week’s worth of rations just because. But she doesn’t say anything, just kisses him on the forehead and whispers, “Thank you.” 

Jim likes her, he does. Even if sometimes she looks too much like his mom, and other times he catches her looking at him or Sam with a deep furrow between her brows, probably imagining how much more their cousins would get to eat if they weren’t around. 

“Jimmy!” Ellie bombs around the corner straight into Jim. He tries to right himself. She’s the youngest, a little slip of a kid, but tired and shaky as he is, her momentum is enough to overwhelm him. He ends up flat on his ass on the floor with a pile of cousins on him, and it’s almost enough to make him forget. For tonight, anyway. His aunt makes the flatbread thing and they sit around the table at and eat it with some jerky that found its way into the ration packets last week. 

“Kodos doesn’t want us getting protein deficient,” Sam says, his voice pompous and booming in clear imitation of the colony’s erstwhile, Romulan-appointed leader. He takes a bite and slips the rest onto Jim’s plate. 

Later, they lie in bed stiffly. Emmett and Joe are snoring on the other side of the room, but Jim can tell by Sam’s breathing that he’s still awake. 

“What did you mean earlier? What’s going to happen six months from now?” Jim asks.

He hears the wet snap of Sam opening his mouth and shutting it again. He takes a breath. “I don’t want to freak anyone out,” he says. “But look, you’ve been watching the broadcasts, right?” 

“Yeah.” Not that there’s been anything else _to_ watch, and there’s music and dancing sometimes and the little kids like it. So Jim watches, watches Kodos stand up and speak about the glory of humanity, the way the strong will triumph. Maybe on this backwater planet, Jim thinks. He’s pretty sure the Romulans have the market cornered on triumph everywhere else. 

“I just have a feeling about him,” Sam says. “I mean, the Romulans don’t give a shit about Tarsus. We’re homesteaders, basically; this colony is them throwing us a bone, and obviously they’re not going to put some guy in charge if all he’s going to do is rile the humans up.” 

Jim can feel him shake his head, the faint _scritch-scratch_ of his head against the pillow. 

“So?” he asks. “Why make those speeches at all?” 

“Trust,” Sam says. “A lot easier to get people to trust you if you tell them what they want to hear. I mean, we’re from Earth, right? Humanity’s got a pretty big ego. And stuck all the way out here, where you can’t see anything, can’t see the Imperial Fleet unless it’s on one of their propaganda holos…I don’t know, Jim. I think it’s pretty easy to start thinking something like that is possible.” 

Jim has to admit, there’s something he likes about the notion of humanity taking a stand. He’s read his history, he knows the Federation did what it did to save Earth and that they mostly succeeded. But he’s read other things too, the books he keeps under his bed, safe from sticky little hands. Stories about revolution. Sometimes he thinks about them, when he watches those broadcasts. But he knows, somehow, that Sam wouldn’t be happy to hear about that.

“You don’t think he means it?” Jim asks. 

“Like I said,” Sam says. “The Romulans are assholes, and they’re xenophobic as hell, but they’re not stupid. They’re not going to sit there and turn a blind eye while a whole planet gets casually turned against them. Which makes me think--shit, Jim, I don’t really even know what I think. Just that...I can’t shake the feeling that something’s happening.” 

“And we’re stuck here,” Jim says glumly. He’s only half-listening to Sam’s theories. The broadcasts are only on once a day, and they distract everyone, even if it’s only for half an hour. If Sam wants to spend his half hour on conspiracy theories, Jim figures that’s his business. 

A couple weeks later, they add another broadcast. It’s at lunch, and they have to sit there in class and watch it. Mandatory, says Ms. Desai, glaring at Jim like she already knows he was planning to ask to go to the fresher, if only for a change of pace. So he sits there and eats his hardtack and jerky and watches Kodos talk about Tarsus and “leading the charge for a new Federation.” He thinks about what Sam said that night he stole the wheat from the food stores. It doesn’t make any more sense to him now than it did then. 

“My mom’s sick,” says Kevin when they’re walking home. He says it conversationally, but Jim can hear a little waver at the bottom of it, like if he asked about it the right way Keven might lose it or something. His mom used to say things that way, sometimes. 

“Yeah?” It seems safe enough. Kevin gets all snotty when he cries, and Jim doesn’t know how the hell to deal with it. 

“Yeah,” he says. “The doctor thinks it’s some kind of deficiency. He’s trying to get her a vitamin booster, but he says they’ve been out for weeks. There was supposed to be a Federation medical ship that they were going to let land, but no one knows if they even made it into the quadrant.” 

“Huh,” Jim says. He’s trying to sound calm, but his heart starts pounding in spite of itself. A Federation ship. _Mom_ , he thinks, but shakes his head almost instantly to dispel it. No point in going there, not with such long odds. But still, he thinks. A whole ship of new people. Would they stay? Would they have room to--

“Are you listening?”

“Huh? Oh, I--sorry.” 

“I was asking if you guys had any extra vitdrops at your place.” 

“Oh,” Jim says. He looks away, out over the dun colored hills. When they first got to Tarsus IV, it was so green. _It’s green as hell here_ , he remembers Sam saying. _Like Iowa_. 

They do have vitdrops, actually. They’re in the bathroom cabinet, and Aunt Nancy doles them out three times a week on a rotating schedule. They taste terrible. Jim remembers the fruit-flavored gummy vitamins he used to get at home, how he stole the jar once and ate half of them and shit for like two days straight. “I guess that’s your punishment,” his mom said from the other side of the bathroom door. 

_It was so worth it,_ Jim thinks. He’d do drastic things for a gummy vitamin these days. But Kevin’s looking at him, getting ready to ask about the drops again. 

“No,” he says. “We ran out too. Aunt Nancy’s freaking out about the little kids.” He shrugs, like he can shake off some of the shock that way, because until he opened his mouth Jim was pretty sure he was going to say yes. 

“Oh,” says Kevin. “Okay.” He gives Jim a long look before he turns away, and Jim is struck with the feeling that Kevin somehow knows he’s lying. Oh well, he thinks. He’s pretty sure Kevin wouldn’t be in any huge hurry to offer up his family’s vitamin stores if the situation were reversed. 

“We have to look out for our own,” he remembers Aunt Nancy saying back when the rationing first started. That same week, she’d sent a comm to Jim’s mom. Jim only knew because he’d overheard her, getting up late at night to use the fresher. “Please, Win,” she’d said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it. So if you get this, if there’s any way you can get here and get them--”

Which was fine, because Jim’s used to his welcome wearing out. People usually want to keep Sam around, though, for whatever reason, so it was weird that Nancy was ready to ship them both off. But as the months have worn on, Jim’s starting to get it. Travel is restricted for pretty much everyone in Romulan space, humans especially so. You need special dispensation to go off planet, and a fat stack of credits goes a long way to greasing the right bureaucratic wheels. Unfortunately, they don’t have a ton of those to spare, and no one’s heard from Jim’s uncle for awhile. He’s deep space, so it’s not necessarily a bad sign, but it’s been longer than usual, and Jim sees Aunt Nancy’s face when she checks her comms every morning. It’s ironic, really, because if it wasn’t for Uncle Pete they probably wouldn’t even have come to Tarsus in the first place. 

“You need a strong male figure in your lives,” Winona had said as she folded Jim’s clothing into a case. It sounded like she was reading straight from a parenting manual, which was often how Winona’s heart-to-hearts went. 

“I’ve got Sam,” Jim said. Something about her comment made him feel betrayed somehow, because they were a team, weren’t they? And wasn’t it enough?

Winona gave him a long look then, her lips pressed together in a tight line. She smiled, a little sadly. “Who’s Sam got?” she asked. 

Now she’s wrenching on some space station somewhere, because Romulans like so-called inferior species to do their dirty work. Jim thinks it’s pretty dumb to put people you’ve colonized and dominated for decades in charge of things like maintaining your life support systems, but then Jim’s never been on the business end of a disruptor. She’s out there where there’s no chance in hell they can get ahold of her in anything close to a timely manner, because the comms have to cycle through Imperial Intelligence and get censored or whatever. And meanwhile, they’re here. 

“We’re here,” Kevin says, rousing Jim from his thoughts. He looks up to see Kevin’s house. It looks as if it’s grown up from the earth, as covered as it is in a fine layer of pale brown dust the same color as the hills. All the houses look the same here, low and narrow. He remembers thinking how weird that was, coming from Iowa where their farmhouse was a great sprawling thing, the end product of three-quarters of a century of erstwhile do-it-yourselfers, each an architectural movement of one. At least Grandpa stuck to the barn, and then Jim’s mom had declared she was just going to leave things be because the whole thing might come down around their ears otherwise. 

Jim misses it like crazy. He never thought he would, which makes it even worse somehow. He’d bury his face in a pile of cowshit just to smell something fecund, something other than the bone-dry dirt that’s plastered itself to the insides of his nose for months. 

“You wanna come in?” Kevin asks. 

Kevin’s only a few years younger, but it seems like more sometimes. Losing the garden was bad for him, Jim thinks. It’s like he decided he was better off cataloguing his toy collection and surfing the web catalogues, daydreaming about all the stuff he was going to get when he got back to Terra. 

“We’re only here for a year,” he’d said when they met, in a tone that made Jim want to punch him. He’d gotten a little better after that, Jim thinks. Mostly. 

“Nah,” Jim says. “I’m going to head home.” 

Kevin shrugs and shifts his backpack on his narrow shoulders. “Whatever,” he says. “See you tomorrow.” 

Jim waves at him. “See you.” 

When he gets home the afternoon broadcast is on. They’re dancing again, and Ellie’s whirling around in front of the holoscreen like a miniature tornado. “Dance with me!” she says, but he shakes his head and flops down onto the couch instead. He’s hungry, but that’s nothing new. Three hours until dinner. Jim sits back and watches Ellie spin.

***

The buzz around the colony is that the medfleet ship is coming after all. Kevin meets them on the way to school one morning and can’t shut up about it, but Jim gets it. Kevin’s mom is worse, and no one’s saying much but Jim thinks she’s probably past the point of the vitdrops doing any good. At least, that’s what he’s telling himself. Aunt Nancy spaces out their own doses by an extra day, and the other day Jim noticed her carrying the bottle around like it was some kind of talisman.

“They’re medfleet, so they’re neutral, right? So they’ve gotta let them land, don’t they?” Kevin asks. 

“I don’t know, Kevin. I hope so,” Sam says. 

Jim glances at his brother. He’s got that look on his face, the one he’s been wearing way too often these days. The one that says the strong male role model missed a left turn at Albuquerque so he’s going to step in and take one for the team. It makes Jim feel like kind of an asshole, honestly, because he can’t even begin to imagine how Sam knows the right things to say to Kevin right now. Jim sure as hell doesn’t. So he stays quiet, listening to Kevin chatter about all the things he’s going to do when he gets back to Earth. Luckily, by the time he starts listing off junk food, they’re at school. Jim’s never been so happy to be there. 

No one is entirely sure when the shuttle is supposed to dock, so the anticipation hangs around like a haze for the better part of two weeks. At first, it’s fun. Jim can’t remember how long it’s been since he really looked forward to something. He relishes the feeling, hoarding it to mull over in quiet moments. But as the days pass, his excitement ferments into a sharp, edgy kind of tension. Before long Jim can’t stand to think about the stupid shuttle, let alone talk to anyone about it, but of course by then everyone’s practically foaming at the mouth and it’s pretty much impossible to get away from. He takes to going for long walks by himself, even though Sam and Aunt Nancy don’t like any of them going too far from the house. 

Jim walks and walks along the road, stumbling up and over mud so dry it’s practically fossilized. Today, he climbs to the top of the hill that looks over town. The grain elevators loom up from the other side, gleaming in the sun. The sky is a blank, violent blue, without even a wisp of cloud. Jim stares at it without really seeing for a long time, until abruptly his eyes pick out a bright pinpoint of light, brilliant as a misplaced star. He shades his eyes, squinting, even though he knows it’s useless. It’s too far up to see like this. But his heart starts pounding, all his earlier excitement flooding back, and before he knows what he’s doing he’s bolting upright, letting fly down the hill with legs pumping and arms windmilling until he gets back to the road. He bursts into the door and the black fuzz swarms into his field of vision so fast that he has to collapse on the couch with his head between his legs so he doesn’t keel over and faint right then and there.

“The ship,” he gasps under his breath. 

“What did you say?” Sam asks, kneeling so they’re eye to eye. 

Jim sucks in lungfuls of air, breathes out as slowly as he can. “The ship,” he says. “I saw it. It’s coming.” 

The notice pops up on the holoscreen in place of the afternoon broadcast. 

_All citizens are encouraged to report to the Central Square at noon tomorrow, 2246.134. Please bring identification for each member of your household._

“Do you think we’re going to get candy?” Ellie asks. 

“Probably not, honey,” Aunt Nancy says. “It’s a med ship, remember?” 

Ellie wrinkles her nose. “Medicine tastes gross,” she says. “I want an Astro Bar.” 

Nancy shakes her head at Jim. “She hasn’t had one of those in years,” she says. “I have no idea how she remembers what they are.” 

It feels hotter than usual on the walk to town. The air’s dry, and Jim’s lips are chapped. He can’t stop licking them, and they crack and sting. Sam walks next to him. He doesn’t say anything, but Jim can practically feel him thinking about something, turning it over and over in his brain. Finally, about three-quarters of the way there, Sam nudges Jim off to one side of the road. 

“You need to tie your shoe,” he says. 

“No, I don’t,” Jim says. 

“Lace looks loose,” Sam says. “Here, let me--” He kneels in front of Jim like he’s a little kid, and Jim drops down eye to eye with him and bats at his hand. 

“I can do it myself, Sam, what the fuck. What are you doing?” Jim asks. 

Sam looks up quickly. Aunt Nancy has moved past them now, into step with Mr. Riley and Kevin. She looks back at them cursorily, then turns away again. 

“Shut up and double-knot your shoes,” Sam says. “And listen to me.” 

“What?” 

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Sam says. He casts around them, like he’s expecting to see something, but of course there’s nothing to see but hill after rolling hill, dying grass rippling crisply in the hot breeze. 

“Great,” Jim says. Sam’s always got a feeling, and it’s usually a bad one. Jim thinks that nothing ever gets worse here. It’s just a steady stream of uniformly shitty from day to day. He might go for a little bad. Like running from that guard back at the grain storage. He remembers the fear, how it made his blood sing. 

“Shut up and listen, Jim. I want you to be ready to run, okay?” 

“What are you talking about? Run where? Do you know something?” 

“Jim, Sam! Catch up, will you?” Aunt Nancy calls. Ellie and the boys are practically skipping in place next to her, like if they got the go-ahead they’d race the rest of the way. 

_Why aren’t you telling them?_ Jim wants to ask. But before he can, Sam takes hold of his elbow and pulls Jim to his feet, and goes back to brooding the rest of the way into town. By the time they get to the outskirts, Jim has half convinced himself that he was hallucinating, that the ship isn’t going to be there at all. But lo and behold, as they emerge from the long allée that dead ends to the Central Square, there’s a big silver shuttle perched on the flagstones. There are police at the perimeter, all sharp angles and pointy ears. Jim keeps his head down, on the off chance any guards from grain storage are pulling double duty.

Most of the civilian Romulans packed up and left after the worst of the drought and food shortages set in. The ones who stuck around don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter; the Romulan Guard likes to punish wayward officers by exiling them to backwaters like Tarsus to think about what they’ve done, and it’s anyone’s guess how permanent an arrangement that is. As a result, the local Romulan police force are a pretty pissy lot, and that’s before you account for whatever got them booted off Romulus in the first place. Now, they stalk the edges of the mass of dirty humans, looking down their noses and forming little conclaves to chatter. 

“Kavar,” says one lightly to another as Jim’s group comes past. “Did you ever see a species that loves filth as much as Terrans do?” He’s staring at Ellie, and the look in his eyes makes Jim’s stomach turn unpleasantly.

“I never did,” says Kavar. “It’s vile, is what it is. Do you suppose they wallow in it? Like pigs?” 

Jim sets his jaw and keeps walking. He can practically hear Sam. _Let it go, Jimmy._

“That little one, though,” says the first guard. “I bet she’d wash up nicely.” 

“I’ll wager you’re right. The boys back at the barracks would--” 

Jim had been so set on imagining Sam’s entreaties to restraint that he’s totally unprepared for his brother to fly out of line before him, to get up in the guard’s face, fingers fisted in the metallic weave of his uniform. Jim thinks dumbly that the guard isn’t much older than Sam. He watches the action play out like a holo. It feels like everything is moving in slow motion.

“She’s a kid, you sick fuck,” Sam’s gritting out. “She’s a fucking kid.” 

The guard spits casually into Sam’s face and plucks him off his shirtfront like a flea. Jim guesses it’s not hard--the guard’s not exactly beefy, but he’s clearly been getting more to eat than Sam has. He dumps Sam in the dirt at his feet, the impact scaring a huff of breath from his body. Sam lies there, clearly stunned, blinking and working his mouth like he still thinks he’s mouthing off to the Romulan. At least, he is until Kavar steps up and kicks him in the ribs several times in quick succession. Sam curls in on himself like he’s trying to fill some hollow the guard’s boot left. 

“Do keep talking,” Kavar says mockingly to Sam. He raises his head and looks straight at Jim. “All of you, keep talking. While you can.” The smile he gives Jim is chilling. 

Jim looks over his shoulder for Aunt Nancy, for Kevin’s dad. They hadn’t stopped when the guard dropped Sam. They clearly hustled on ahead; they’ve moved up the line and Jim just makes out Aunt Nancy’s face, looking back. Jim imagines she looks guilty, but that might just be wishful thinking. 

Jim curses and drops to the dirt next to his brother. The guards have moved off, fun over, and as Jim looks after them he sees the sun hit the disruptor at Kavar’s belt and is hit with the sudden knowledge that the past five minutes could have spun out very differently indeed. 

“Sam,” Jim says. “Can you sit up?” Sam whimpers and nods. Jim helps him into a sitting position and winces as he leans over and retches bile onto the ground before him. The scant liquid sinks into the parched earth almost instantly. 

“You okay?” 

Sam shakes his head. “Think that asshole cracked a rib,” he says. He prods at his torso gingerly. “Or a couple of ribs.” 

“You’re an idiot,” Jim says. “What if I’d’ve done that? You’d have laid me out yourself.” 

Sam smiles wanly. “S’true,” he says. “I just...I don’t know what came over me. It was stupid.” 

“Nah,” Jim says. “It was brave.” 

He helps Sam get to his feet and the two of them limp slowly on into the square proper. Next to the shuttle, Jim can see a big square stage that looks a little like an old Terran bareknuckle ring, roped off on all sides. There’s a trio of figures standing on the stage. As Jim gets closer, one of them materializes into Kodos, flanked by guards. But there’s someone else on the stage too, a human woman in a tattered Medfleet uniform. She’s kneeling. Jim’s heart, just now winding down from Sam’s run-in with the guards, begins to pound again. Next to him, Sam is looking at the ground, his face white with pain. 

“Sam,” Jim whispers. On the stage, one of the guards has stepped forward. The woman’s hair is the color of copper, and the hot, dry air lifts it back off her face. Her cheeks are as pallid as Sam’s. 

“Sam,” Jim says again. The guard raises something that catches the light. 

_I’ve got a bad feeling about this._

Onstage the woman crumples, and Kodos starts talking.

***

“Jim.”

“Mmm.” Jim is sleeping, or he was. He’s not sure how long he’s been out for, and he’s cold. Temps drop fast at night out in the open, and the patch of shelter they’ve staked out in the lee of a building isn’t exactly cozy. Jim vaguely remembers curling up with Sam like a puppy. Whether it was a long time or just a minute ago, he’s not sure. But his joints creak as he sits groggily up, and the night is starting to grey out over the horizon. Next to him, Sam is hunched awkwardly on the ground, and as he turns to look at Jim his face blanches and he presses his lips together. 

“You okay?” Jim asks, even though he knows the answer. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Sam says, for the ten millionth time since they landed on this stupid planet. 

This time, though, it’s different. Jim might be dense sometimes, compared to Sam, but even he can tell this much. Of course, now the stakes are just a little higher. They’re huddled alongside a building on the eastern side of the square. Jim thinks it was a bank once. All around them are the lumps of sleeping bodies--Jim hopes they’re sleeping, anyway. That’s debatable, because after the Medfleet officer was executed, everything went to hell. The guards started shooting into the crowd, and for awhile Jim was convinced that they had orders to gun the humans down like fish in a barrel. But things calmed down eventually, for a given definition of calm, and they were penned into the square like cattle in a feedlot, awaiting their fate. Whatever it is, Jim’s one hundred percent sure it isn’t good. 

“What are you thinking?” 

“I’m thinking...I’m thinking that none of us are going home.” 

Jim swallows hard. It’s nothing he hasn’t already thought about, but hearing it from Sam makes it real somehow. He’d rather hear it from Sam, he thinks. All of a sudden, he knows what Winona was talking about, when she sat on the edge of Jim’s bed and folded his stacks of t-shirts. Because for better or worse, Jim has Sam. Sam doesn’t have anyone. Right now, all he’s got is a chestful of broken ribs and a grim sense of certainty Jim thinks he might have been carrying since Iowa. 

Jim shrugs. “So?”   
Sam looks up at him and shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. He licks his lips and looks out over the square. Some of the colonists--prisoners, now--have lit fires from piles of trash. They burn strangely in the colorless pre-dawn murk, orange tinged with strokes of pink and blue and green. Beyond the fires is the mercury gleam of the shuttle, looming over the scene like a predatory bird. It has a twin now--or a sibling, anyway, a big ugly Imperial cruiser that set down last night and set the crowd abuzz.

“What do you think the guard’s like on that thing?” 

“What, the Romulan one?” 

Sam nods. “Yeah. That Medfleet shuttle might as well be scrap at this point.” 

Jim’s still trying to tease out what Sam’s getting at. “Dude, what are you thinking? We can’t steal a shuttle.” 

Sam looks pained. “Of course we can’t,” he says. “But look, that shuttle’s going somewhere. And...and I think you should be on it when it does.” 

Jim looks down at the earth. He reaches down and traces the perimeter of a cracked flagstone. “Me?” he asks finally. “What about--” 

“So, here’s the thing,” Sam says, casually as if he’s about to give Jim some tip on how to better phrase some line of code, or how to tackle a boss battle playing games. “I’m--it’s getting kind of hard to breathe.” 

“That’s the atmo,” Jim says automatically. “It gets to me too.” 

“Not just sitting around,” Sam says.

And though Jim doesn’t want to hear, it even though the last thing he wants to hear is anything other than Sam’s fucking know-it-all voice telling him all about whatever he’s doing wrong...he can’t help but hear the wheeze creep in around the edges of Sam’s words. And the morning light might be shaded cyan, the beginnings of that searing blue sky Jim’s so damn sick of. But the way the light’s touching Sam’s lips, daubing them that same dusky color--well, Jim’s no medic, but he doesn’t have to be to know that’s not good. 

“You’re fine,” Jim says. “Broken ribs heal.” 

“Not broken lungs,” Sam says. “Not...not out here. Not like this.” 

“Shut up, Sam.” 

“I’m just saying--” 

“Shut _up_.” 

With great effort, Sam shifts to one side and fishes something out of his pocket. “I went for a walk while you were sleeping. Found Kevin’s dad.” He doesn’t say he found Kevin, and Jim somehow doesn’t think it’s an accident. 

“You shouldn’t have been moving around so much.” 

“Just listen to me. He gave me this.” He tosses a flimsy rectangle at Jim. Jim picks it up and recognizes it as a flimsy piece of plasteel--an ID chip. It’s got Kevin’s face on it. 

“What the hell,” Jim says. “What the hell, Sam.” It’s all too much. All their hopes for the Medfleet shuttle gone to shit, Sam, Kevin--he’s starting to feel his head swim. 

“Don’t think about it,” Sam says. “Just take his chip and give me yours. I think it’s better if you’re...if you’re someone else. If you’re going to do this.” 

“Do _what?_ ” 

“Get out of here.” 

“I’m not going without you,” Jim says, tracing another line through the dirt. “So you can just forget it.” 

They’re quiet after that. Sam’s breathing is getting steadily worse, and there’s no way Jim can pretend it out of existence the way he wants to. So he just sits and waits for the night to die away, pretending he’d not waiting for his brother to do the same. 

“Get out of here,” Sam says again, some time later. He sounds like he’s answering Jim’s question from before, like he forgot he did it the last time. Jim looks over at him. Sam’s skin is the color of a brook trout, greyish and mottled. 

“Sam?” 

“I--ah. I mean it.” The words are drawn out and gaspy, fishy too in the way they so clearly search for unforthcoming oxygen. There’s plenty of it, is the thing. It’s thin, but it’s there. But Sam’s beyond all that now. “Jim. Don’t want you to--” He flaps his hand uselessly, directionlessly. 

Anywhere but here, the hand says. Around them, people are starting to notice. Jim hates them all, hates their dumb cow eyes. They’ve feared this moment for themselves so long they can’t-- _won’t_ \--see it for what it is in someone else. Jim catches a blur of motion, as if someone is stepping forward, but they stop and it doesn’t come again. 

“Go away,” lisps the shade that was once his brother. 

Jim goes. 

He gets unsteadily to his feet and closes his fingers around Kevin’s ID chip so hard the plasteel cuts into his fingers. He pushes past the tight circle of not-quite-onlookers, and his eyes are so full and hot he can’t tell where he’s going. All he knows is that he can’t watch his brother die any more than that mob of strangers can, and for that he is the worst kind of coward.

***

He makes it onto the shuttle.

Security, just as Sam hinted, is lax, and Jim waits in the shadow of another husk of a building until something begins to happen. They’re moving the colonists, funnelling them towards one end of the square. The same end the shuttle is on, conveniently, though it’s not really so convenient because to get there Jim has to filter through a mob of people in varying levels of panic. Somewhere deep inside he thinks he can identify the version of himself that would have lost it right along with them, the person who will mourn Sam later, but right now that person seems subsumed by layer upon layer of blessed numbness. There’s the lightness in his bones Jim’s gotten used to, the ever-present throb of hunger. That’s it. 

He’s small, and by now he’s had plenty of practice ducking the guards at the grain stores. These are no different, disaffected and more interested in working their jaws, hefting their weapons around. He works his way close enough, watches the nearest pair of guards staring out at the slowly moving humans, working their way towards some unknown end. Jim’s not waiting around to find out what that is. He sees the guards turn away, and he doesn’t hesitate. He can’t bring himself to look back; if he does he’s sure he’ll lose his nerve. He just goes, and the hangar door is ajar as if it’s been waiting for him all this time. Heart racing, sweat clinging to his temples, he wedges himself into a stack of boxes, puts his head between his knees and tries his hardest not to think. 

“Hello, what do we have here.” 

Something sharpish prods Jim in the side and he blinks awake. He’s still crammed in the hangar on the Imperial shuttle, only now there’s a mean-looking Romulan jabbing him with the barrel of a disruptor. _Great,_ is all Jim has the energy to think. Just great. 

“A stowaway,” says the Romulan. He reaches for Jim and pulls him up to standing by the shoulder, and part of Jim takes a second to marvel at the ease of it, the way his body can be handled with the same doll-like carelessness as Sam’s had yesterday. But he’s still not thinking about that, so instead he focuses on the Romulan’s fingers, the points of pain where they dig into Jim’s clavicle. 

“Stand on your feet, boy,” the guard says. 

“I don’t feel like it,” Jim says. “So why don’t you go ahead and shoot me.” 

The Romulan makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “Are you so ready to cast off life?” he says to Jim. 

Jim laughs and laughs.

***

“I found him in the cargo hold,” the guard says. “A _Terrhasu_ rat, fleeing the sinking ship.”

The ranking officers look more annoyed than anything else. It figures that Jim would find himself at the mercy of a group of Romulans who seem unenthusiastic about executing a stray human teenager. Jim’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have made it this far with the guards from back on the colony. _These guys must not be from around here,_ he thinks. 

The officer in charge--the guard addressed him as Commander--sighs and runs a hand over his face. “There’s nothing for it,” he says. “We’re out of range of Tarsus IV by now anyway. Boy,” he says to Jim. “Do you know what you left behind?” 

Jim is starting to get a pretty good idea. He nods. 

“Then you may thank me for this, one day,” the Romulan says cryptically. He makes a motion like the clap of a gavel, smacking the armrest of his captain’s chair. Jim half-remembers the old courtroom dramas his mother used to watch on repeat sometimes. He always thought they were boring. 

“For the charge of trespassing on an Imperial vessel, I hereby sentence you to three years hard labor. Take him to the transport hold. We were headed there anyway,” he says to himself, shrugging like he’s just sent Jim to his room. 

The ship is freezing. Jim spends most of his time huddled in a ball, clutching his clothes around him and dreaming about the hot, dry, godforsaken rock he’s left behind. The transport hold is in what looks like a modified cargo bay, cuffed to an uncomfortable jump seat he abandoned as soon as he could, shimmying off of it down onto the floor. He wedges himself as deeply as he can between the seat and the bulkhead. The ship hums against his spine, a music all her own, and it lulls him. There’s a soft-looking pile over in the corner, sackcloth or something, but he’s got no hope of getting over to it with the ankle cuff as tight as it is. He runs his fingers over it, hoping vainly for some little chink, somewhere to dig in and pry, but the metal is infuriatingly smooth and Jim’s been turned inside and out by guards looking for sharps twice already. He gives the cloth a last look before he actively decides to stop obsessing, turning instead to trace the periphery of the cavernous space he’s confined to. 

The guard who found him didn’t shoot him, and neither did the commanding officers he dragged Jim in front of. 

There’s quite the mix of beings making their way to the prison planet, wherever it is, taken from makeshift jails and holding cells on planet after planet across the Empire and scraped into the hold like muck off a boot. Most of them seem disinclined to talk, ignoring Jim’s stage whispers and avoiding his eyes. It’s probably for the best, but it’s not getting any of his questions answered.

“Where’re we going?” he asks the new guards at shift change. Same question he asks every shift, same inconclusive grunt in reply. It’s getting annoying, and Jim is getting closer and closer to making a few choice remarks about how he thought Romulans were supposed to smarter than lowly humans. Then he imagines what Sam would say about that, and the words die in his throat.

“Not worth engaging with ‘em.” The voice breaks out of the gloom, husky like it’s been shouting, as if Jim had been talking to the guards minutes instead of hours ago . As it is, it takes him a second to remember, his hands stiff with cold and his brain sluggish with half-sleep.

“What?” 

“Trust me, once we get where we’re going, you’ll be better off if you’re not a familiar face.”

“Do you know where we’re going?” Jim still can’t really tell who he’s talking to. The shadows hem in close after lights-out, and they could be concealing anything in here. He shudders at the thought. _You’re cold_ , he tells himself. _You’re just cold_. He tries to turn in the direction he thinks the voice is coming from and the ankle cuff bites at his skin. 

“Not sure,” says the voice. “Word around here’s that it’s Vulcan.” 

Jim sucks in a breath. “Seriously?” 

“We all wash up on Vulcan eventually, I guess. All us space trash.” The voice laughs itself into a phlegmy cough. Jim wrinkles his nose reflexively at the sound, glad for the dark after all. It’s quiet after that, and Jim sits back and lets the ship rock him into a dreamless sleep. When he opens his eyes again, it’s after the next shift change, which means it’s just about time for lights on. 

Days on the ship go by slowly. Jim’s not sure whether to be relieved or concerned by the air of quiet resignation that seems to permeate the room. There’s little sound, just the whir of the ship, the occasional sniff or hack or whisper. He perks up at these last sounds, wishing desperately he could walk around. All this sitting makes him want to think, just to have something to do, and if he thinks Sam looms up so close it makes him pick at his cuticles, his arms, anywhere he can scare up enough pain to push the thoughts back down a little while longer.

“Hey,” he calls once or twice, when the patrols are on the far side of the bay. “Hey!” 

But the far-off voices stop as soon as he speaks, and they don’t start back up again. Jim sighs, a warmish huff of breath that dissipates too soon. He leans forward, making a fist and pressing his knuckles up against his teeth. It’s hot on Vulcan, right? If you can even go outside, that is--they’d always heard the Romulans blasted the crap out of Vulcan when they got through with her. 

He’d always liked hearing about the Vulcans, about the people who heard Earth calling and came down out of the stars to look. They had a big book about it back on the farm, _Cochrane’s Illustrated History of First Contact_. He’d worn the pages ragged. They didn’t have to come, he thinks. He imagines that first ship scanning the black, hearing the spark and jolt of Cochrane’s fledgling attempts at warp and deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble. He wonders if they’d have been better or worse off that way. 

Vulcan is hot, as it turns out. Jim is over it by about twenty minutes after they land. They’re unloaded like cargo, the guards waving them onto transports at disruptor point. There isn’t a lot to see; the prison is kind of in the middle of nowhere and there’s a persistent yellowy haze that hangs over everything. Jim stares out the window anyway; it’s been so long since he saw anything but Tarsus, and in spite of where they’re going he can’t help the weird sense of relief he feels at seeing something different. _No more blue sky_ , he thinks. 

The transport feels like an oven, and the burly Klingon next to him is taking up about half Jim’s seat in addition to his own. He leans over and mutters something in Jim’s ear. It sounds like a question, but since it’s in Klingon Jim can only shrug and hope he didn’t just agree to something he’ll regret. 

There are mountains rising in the distance. He catches glimpses when the soupy mist swirls and parts. Between the mountains and the road is a spiky field of tall black mining towers. They remind him of visiting relatives in Texas; they’d always pointed them out with a weird kind of pride. Those had been gaudily decorated, gawky giants dressed up as flowering trees or cartoon characters. Compared to the Romulan versions, they seem benign, friendly even. Something about the drills looming out of the haze chills Jim despite the baking heat. He rests his head against the warm glass of the window and closes his eyes. The Klingon’s arm is sweat-sticky against his own, and Jim feels a twinge of claustrophobia. 

He’s halfway asleep when the transport stops with a jolt. A guard gets up in front, brandishing his disruptor. He wonders vaguely if they could take him, the whole mob of them. But looking around, he can tell there’s not much of a mob. There are a fair number of rough-looking dudes, like Jim’s Klingon seatmate, but most of the prisoners skew old and young, and too many of them have the hollowed-out pallor that Jim’s come to associate with Tarsus. Too much work on too little food. It’s starting to seem like a universal constant. 

“Up,” the guard says. “One by one. Orderly, understand?” His Standard is decent, but he drawls at them like they can’t hear. He indicates the first prisoner with the barrel of his weapon. There’s movement outside; Jim cranes his neck to see out the window and just makes out a couple uniforms, one of whom is holding a PADD. Imperial Guard, by the look of them. He swallows. _Decide now_ , he thinks. Decide now so you don’t hesitate, because the second you do it’s all over. 

The Klingon grunts and gets to his feet, shuffling up the aisle in his ankle cuffs when the guard beckons, and then it’s Jim’s turn. He hops off the last step awkwardly, displacing a cloud of red dust. The uniform makes a face like he just smelled something bad, which under the circumstances could actually be true. The guy looks like a tightass, though, so Jim gets the feeling he’s just pissed he got dirt on those shiny boots. 

“ID chip?” he says.

Jim hands it over. If he takes a breath, hesitates just a beat, the uniform doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes flick up to Jim’s face and back down to his PADD. “Riley, Kevin. last permanent residence Tarsus IV?” 

Jim nods.

“Very well. Proceed to the infirmary for medical intake protocol.” He nods in the general direction of what must be the infirmary, white and glaring at the end of a gauntlet of armed guards. 

“Proceed to the infirmary,” Jim parrots under his breath. Definitely a tightass. 

The infirmary is basically a glorified tent, though it’s huge and clearly intended to be permanent given the layout and the sheer amount of heavy looking med equipment lying around. Jim wonders idly if it’s salvaged Vulcan tech, but then a youngish Romulan woman in white waves at him and the nearest guard gives Jim a nudge in the back with his disruptor. 

“All right, all right,” Jim says, as he’s ushered into a makeshift exam room, flimsy blue sheeting draped over three sides of a metal frame. The guard looms across the doorway, but the woman glares at him and reaches around his bulky form to yank at the curtain that serves as a door. 

“I’m not certain I should leave you two alone,” the guard says. She replies in Romulan. Whatever she says makes the guard snort and spit juicily on the floor, but he moves aside and lets her close the curtain the rest of the way. 

“Sit,” she says, indicating a metal stool. Jim complies, and she picks up a PADD and swipes at the screen. 

“Name?” she says. 

“Kevin Riley,” he says. 

“Age?” 

“Um, fifteen.” 

He thinks he sees her brows shoot up at that, but she recovers quickly enough. “Standard years?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Significant medical history?” 

“Uh...I don’t know,” he says, crossing his arms. “I broke my wrist when I was ten. You mean like that?” 

She nods. “Any instances of infectious disease?” 

“I had Rigellian flu, like...eight months ago?” 

“Full recovery?” 

“I guess so.” 

She bites her lip. “I don’t suppose you’d have access to your vaccination history,” she says softly, as if to herself. 

“My mom--that is, my mother always did all that,” Jim said. 

She sighs, looking up from her PADD to meet Jim’s eyes. “And where is your mother now?” 

“I don’t know,” Jim says. 

She winces. It’s subtle, but it’s there, and something about the expression makes Jim swallow past a sudden lump in his throat. The doctor schools her features into neutrality again and straightens, adjusting her coat. “You’ll need a full vax course, then, as a precautionary measure. I’ll make a note in your chart. Now, if you’ll remove your clothing, I’ll conduct a physical exam.” 

Jim is powerless to stop what’s probably a full-body blush. He stammers something unintelligible, but the doctor ignores him, turning around and making a show of opening a box of disposable gloves. Jim figures it’s as close as he’s going to get to privacy, so he stands up and shucks off his clothing, balling it up on the stool next to him. He sets his boots on the floor. 

“We’ll dispose of those,” the doctor says when she turns back around, eyeing the pile with distaste. 

“Oh,” says Jim. 

He bites his lip and stares at the place where the curtain meets the tent wall. She pokes and prods, peers into his mouth and shines a light into his nose and ears. Jim’s face blazes when she leans down and examines his lower half, but then it’s over and she’s pulling off her gloves with a snap and tossing them into the recycler. 

“You seem in reasonably good health,” she says. “You are, of course, significantly underweight. I will include a recommendation for double rations until you are able to maintain an average weight for your height.” 

“You--you can do that?” 

“I can recommend it. I can’t guarantee my request will be honored.” 

“Oh,” Jim says. “Well, thanks anyway.” 

She gives him a long look. “You’re welcome,” she says, tapping her PADD. “I’m putting in orders for you now. You’ll proceed to the freshers, then you’ll get your ID chip and the vaxes we talked about.” 

“I’ve got an ID chip,” he says holding it up. He’d palmed it when he undressed. 

“They’ll confiscate that,” she says. “Or not, it won’t matter.” She holds out her arm and pats at the inside, halfway between her wrist and elbow. “Your new one is an implant.” 

Jim can’t think of anything to say to that. He looks longingly at his clothes, but the doctor just opens the recycler and indicates the pile of dirty fabric. No point in arguing for a bunch of   
rags, so he grabs it up and stuffs it inside. As he joins the lines of similarly undressed prisoners waiting for the sonics, holding his boots awkwardly over his crotch, he thinks about those clothes and the pale Tarsus dust clinging to the weave of the fabric.

***

Thanks to the implant and the shots, Jim’s arm hurts like a son of a bitch. Which is unfortunate, because the crowd here isn’t exactly the considerate type. After the sonics, a guard tosses him a uniform and motions for him to put it on. He’s glad for the boots; they were hand-me-downs from Sam and he remembers how pissed he was that he hadn’t gotten new ones. But they’re in good shape, the leather thick and well-oiled, and when he sees what some of the other prisoners are working with he says a silent thank you to the universe for them.

He cradles his bad arm against his chest in the dinner line. They’re supposed to stand still and get the chips scanned before they get their food, or so Jim gathers from the way the guards are yelling and waving their disruptors around. Things get a less chaotic, but not by much. While theoretically there might have been a way for the doctor to make good on her promise of double rations, in practice only about one in three actually gets his chip scanned. Jim gets the impression that offering himself up for it is not the way to go. 

The seasoned prisoners eye the new arrivals with interest, as do the guards. Jim remembers the advice he got on the ship and keeps his head down, avoiding their gazes. He picks up a tray of food and spots a free seat in the back of the room. He makes a beeline for it like he has tunnel vision, and manages to walk smack into a man who steps out into his path. They barely save their respective trays, though Jim’s glass of milk is a casualty, pooling beneath his plate. 

“Watch it!” 

“Shit,” Jim says. “I’m sorry.” 

The guy looks pissed, gathering himself as if to storm off, but then he looks at Jim and does a double take. “They running an orphanage here now? How old are you?”

Jim straightens. “Old enough,” he says. 

“For what?” 

Jim doesn’t have an answer for that, just narrows his eyes at the guy and says, “Shut up, man,” like he’s not in fucking jail with hardened criminals who probably have weapons carved out of who knows what stashed God knows where. 

The guy just stares, then jerks his head in the direction of a half-full table. “C’mon,” he says. “You obviously need all the help you can get.” 

For all his bluster, Hikaru Sulu is only 20. He also might be a little bit crazy. 

“How’d you end up here, anyway?” Jim asks him between mouthfuls of stew. He has absolutely no idea what’s in it, but it’s hot and it’s not hardtack, so he doesn’t care. 

“Better watch yourself, asking that question,” Sulu says. “You ask the wrong person, you could be in for a world of hurt.” 

Jim swallows. “Are you the wrong person?” 

“Depends who’s asking,” Sulu says. He gives Jim a long, measuring look. “I flew a shuttle into a Tal Shiar outpost.” 

“Bullshit,” Jim says.

Sulu holds up a hand. “Swear to God,” he says. Then he sighs out a breath, deflating. “Fine, it wasn’t exactly on purpose, but it took out half a dozen pointy-ears all the same.” 

Jim looks for a hint of anything like remorse, but it isn’t forthcoming. “What were you doing flying a shuttle?” 

“Practicing,” Sulu says. “My parents were pilots; they stashed an old private model in the back yard under a tarp. Would you believe the Romulans didn’t even look at it? Or maybe they did, and they just didn’t care. That thing was a piece of junk, but I got her up and running again. For a little while, anyway.” 

“Where are you from?” 

“San Francisco,” Sulu says proudly. “But I grew up on Cestra; I was 5 when the Empire took over. What about you?” 

“Iowa,” Jim says. “We lived on a farm. My dad was Starfleet, when there still was a Starfleet, but he...he died when I was a baby. My mom’s an engineer; she took a wrench job in deep space like two years ago.” 

“She know you’re here?” 

Jim shakes his head. “I was living with my aunt on Tarsus.” 

Sulu bites his lip, as if he’s not sure how to continue. “News is kinda sketchy in here, but...I heard some things about Tarsus.” He pauses, like he’s waiting for Jim to confirm or deny. 

Jim looks at his plate, dragging the blunt fork through the dregs of his stew. “It was bad,” he says. “I don’t--” To his horror, his voice catches, and he looks desperately up at Sulu. He’s not sure what he’s afraid of, just that he is. A swirl of guilt and fear catches him up, and for the first time in a long time he badly wants to cry. 

“Hey, man,” Sulu says quietly. “It’s okay.” 

Jim looks away again, nodding. Sulu lets the topic drop, and they sit in silence until movement from the front of the room catches Jim’s eye. It’s that uptight Romulan from before, the one who took his name down. He’s standing at the front of the room, and Jim wonders how the hell someone like that gets a roomful of criminals to do what he says. But then, there’s a row of pissed-off looking guards standing behind him, so maybe that’s how. 

“That’s Spock,” Sulu offers. “He’s our Sublieutenant. For the unit, I mean. Apparently he’s some kind of _wunderkind_ ; I think he’s younger than me.” Sulu rolls his eyes. 

“How big’s the stick up his ass?” 

Sulu snorts. “Plenty big,” he says. “Spock’s tough, but he’s not cruel. You got lucky landing here. Well, half-lucky, I guess. See that squirrelly looking dude over there?” 

“Yeah,” Jim says. The man in question is considerably bulkier than Spock, and he’s looking at him with badly concealed dislike. 

“That’s Jarok,” Sulu says. “He’s...tough _and_ cruel. You want to stay out of his way.” 

“Attention Unit B,” Spock says loudly. The noise in the room diminishes, but only slightly. 

“Today we welcome a number of new residents,” Spock continues. “Will the following inmates report to me after tomorrow’s morning meal for work assignments…” He glances at his PADD and rattles off a list of ID numbers. Jim has already forgotten his, but he assumes his name is somewhere on Spock’s list. 

“What’s work around here?” he asks Sulu, leaning over the table. 

“Depends,” Sulu says. “We’ve been working on blasting out this quarry the past few weeks. Twenty-plus miles straight out in the desert and hot as balls. God, I hope they don’t find much of whatever they’re looking for, because I sure as hell don’t want to punch my chip in there every day for the next two years.” 

“That’s when you’re getting out?” Two years seems impossibly long to Jim. But then, his sentence is longer. 

Sulu nods. “Supposed to be.” 

“How long have you been here?” 

Sulu looks up quickly, and Jim gets the feeling this is another question you don’t ask just anybody. But then Sulu smiles, a sharp smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, and holds up three fingers. 

Jim can’t imagine spending five years here. He can’t imagine spending the night. He tries to keep his face neutral, but there’s an answering tightness around Sulu’s mouth that makes Jim think he gave himself away. 

“Yeah, it’s been a real cultural experience,” Sulu says, gesturing around him at the mess hall. It’s a cacophony, different languages melting together into an impossibly loud buzz. Jim guesses about half the inmates are human. The rest run the gamut of other species, denizens of the countless planets that have fallen to the Empire. There are some Jim knows on sight--the Klingon from his transport, who seems to have fallen in with a tableful of his compatriots; a Tellarite, a trio of Andorians. 

“Where are the Vulcans?” he asks Sulu. It’s their planet, after all--surely some of them have run afoul of the Romulans in more tangible ways than just blood. 

Sulu makes a slicing motion across his throat. “They didn’t make it 10 years into the occupation. I guess old grudges die hard.” 

“But...but there were billions of them,” Jim says. 

“Half the planet’s barely inhabitable; they nuked it to kingdom come.” 

Jim’s mouth has gone dry. “But the Federation--”

Sulu looks around them. “Shut up about that,” he hisses. “That’s the kind of shit that gets you a nice long stay in solitary, or worse.” 

Jim pushes his bowl away, leaning his elbows heavily on the table. He’s tired. 

Jim is assigned to the same sleeping quarters as Sulu. He isn’t sure whether or not to be happy about that yet. They sleep in bunks, ten to a room. Sulu’s bunk has a spare, and naturally it’s on the top. Jim doesn’t ask what happened to its previous occupant--he’s just going to go ahead and assume he was released. The bunkrooms are ventilated, like they were actually climate controlled in some past life, but the vent next to Jim’s top bunk emits nothing but a weak stream of room-temperature air. He flops on his back on top of the sheets and rests his arm behind his head. Despite the heat and the hum of noise below, he falls into a dreamless sleep. 

He wakes with a start to a tone over the comm system. It somehow manages to be deep and piercing all at once, and he doesn’t think it would be physically possible to sleep through. Jim sits up and narrowly misses whacking his head on a ceiling beam. He’s sticky with sweat, the desire to bathe so intense it makes his skin crawl. Sulu slaps the side of Jim’s bunk. 

“Get up,” he says. “Breakfast is in half an hour, and if you don’t make it to the sonics before then you don’t get clean.” 

Jim slides off of the bed, grabbing his uniform and making for the door, where a guard is already doing a headcount. When he gets there, the guard steps into his path. “That’s quota,” he says. “Wait until someone comes back.” 

He doesn’t make it before breakfast, of course. After he finishes his bowl of porridge he looks around to see if Spock’s there to report to, feeling a misplaced urge to straighten himself up. He runs a hand through his hair even as he reminds himself that it really doesn’t matter. He’s being assigned to a work detail, not going on a job interview. Not that he would know how to dress for one of those, either. 

It’s just that Spock looks so...geometric, standing there in his perfectly pressed gunmetal grey uniform, the exaggerated right-angled shoulder pads the Romulans favor making him look square and solid. His wrists give him away, though, as do his cheekbones. There’s something tightly drawn about him. Jim can’t put his finger on it, and it makes him nervous. A little bit of power rarely mixes well with hazy motivation. 

He goes up to Spock anyway. There’s nothing for it. Either he’ll find Spock or Spock will find him, and Jim knows it’s usually not such a good idea to encourage people to come looking. 

“Sir?” he says. 

Spock looks up from his PADD. “Yes?” 

“I came in on the transport yesterday. I’m reporting for work detail.” 

“Yes,” Spock says, dragging a finger across the screen. “Identification number?” 

Jim swallows. “Um, I’m not sure I remember.” 

Spock reaches into his pocket and pulls out a portable scanner. “Your arm,” he says, gesturing at Jim, who dumbly holds it out. Spock moves closer to him, reaching out, and for a second Jim thinks he’s going to touch his wrist. But he stops short, miming a little tugging motion in the air. “Lift up your sleeve,” he says. 

“Oh, um...sorry.” Jim jams his sleeve up over his elbow, exposing the inside of his arm and with it a swollen, reddened square of skin. 

Again, Spock’s fingers hover just shy of touching Jim. “The wound looks irritated,” he says. “Report to the infirmary if the redness and swelling persist, or if the area becomes hot to the touch.” He brings up the scanner with the other hand and presses the button. A green light blinks rapidly. He doesn’t feel anything, which is surprising; he expected a tingle or a sting. 

Spock consults his PADD. “06911,” he says thoughtfully. “According to my records, your medical file has been flagged.” 

“Flagged?” 

“Correct. It appears Dr. N’Shira finds you significantly underweight for your height and age, and recommends a modified workload for the forseeable future.” He reads further, then looks back up at Jim. “Did you receive double rations at the morning meal?” 

“No,” Jim says, squaring his shoulders. All this talk about how scrawny he is is starting to bug him. “Look, I wasn’t exactly getting three squares on Tarsus, okay? But it’s fine. _I’m_ fine. I can work.” 

“What is it you Terrans say?” Spock asks, his eyes on the PADD again. “Ah, yes. ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’” He taps in a code, then motions for Jim’s arm again to scan it. 

“Are you at all proficient with computers?” Spock asks. 

“Yeah, actually.” 

“Very well. Report to Block 5 at 0900. I will explain your duties in greater detail at that time.” 

Jim just stands there nodding until Spock looks up again. “Is there anything else?” he asks. 

Jim realizes belatedly that his mouth is hanging open. He shuts it, licking his lips. “No,” he says. “That’s all.” 

“Then I suggest you return to your bunk. Morning headcount begins in three minutes.” Spock closes the cover on his PADD with a neat snap, turns, and walks away in the direction of the door. 

“Well, shit,” Jim mutters to himself, and hurries after him. Back in the bunkhouse, waiting for Spock and Jarok and their guard detail, Jim nudges Sulu with his shoulder. 

“What?” Sulu hisses. They’re supposed to be standing silently at attention.

“Spock,” Jim says. “He’s kind of...weird.” 

“Six months back, three guys shanked a guard and got ahold of a disruptor. It happened in the mess at dinner; it was nuts, and they were big guys. Spock cleared that room in thirty seconds, took down all three of them _unarmed_ in like four minutes. He just walked out of the mess hall with blood streaming out of his nose, wiped his face, and tossed the disruptor at a guard like it was nothing. I want to know where that guy learned to fight.” He shakes his head. “Or maybe I don’t.” 

Jim’s not sure how this additional information makes him feel. But he doesn’t get a chance to say as much to Sulu. That dissonant tone peals over the comm again, and it’s time to face forward and be counted.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Spock is well aware that this assignment is intended to discourage him, to send him creeping back to his dusty moon colony and leave the Guard to true sons and daughters of the Empire._
> 
>  
> 
> _And yet, the Empire does not know his greatest secret._

Spock opens his eyes. The morning alarm will sound in ninety-three minutes. Perfect. He slides out from under the blankets and sits up. The floor is cool against the soles of his feet when he rises. He dresses as quietly as he can, sparing a glance across the room at Jarok, who snores loudly once and rolls over to face the wall. Spock shakes his head; Jarok is soft and lazy and needs this more than Spock does, but the suggestion isn’t worth the inevitable battle of wills that would result. Spock leaves the room, sliding the door closed manually to save the whoosh and click of the pneumatic locking mechanism. He slips from the dormitory into the cool morning, blue shadows hanging languorously before the incipient heat of the day. Spock prefers mornings, particularly here, where the bustle and hum of other beings seems nearly ceaseless. Now, the grounds are quiet, and as Spock breaks into a jog to shake the torpor from his muscles he imagines himself to be entirely alone in the universe. 

_Not far from the truth,_ he thinks. Once, this thought would have hobbled him, but those days are long past. 

He arrives at the gymnasium and enters his access code, calling for lights as he steps inside. Spock lets his mind still as he begins his routine, the same sequence of calisthenics and resistance exercises he performs every morning. When he was younger, he ran. Mile after mile on the road that led away from the house he shared with Talae and Nakar, eyes trained on the ground before him so as not to see the flat earth to either side. They no longer lived on the Shi’Kahr plain, having moved off-world shortly after the death of Spock’s parents. In the early days of his new life Spock felt the mountains’ absence like a throb. At first, he counted steps, the storm of his thoughts breaking in with regularity. With practice his counting reached into the hundreds, then the thousands, and then ceased altogether, leaving his mind blank and still as a pool of water. And so, Spock learned to meditate. His methods were far removed from traditional Vulcan practice, but they served, with the advantage of appearing indistinguishable from simple physical exercise. 

In the gym, Spock circles the punching bag. He allows himself to retreat from his meditative state as he lands a well-placed hit. He has twenty-three more minutes available to devote to physical activity, after which he will clean and dress and supervise Unit B’s morning routine. Following the morning headcount, Spock will oversee the light-duty prisoners programming and populating databases. He makes a mental note to review 06911’s latest physical data; he should be approaching a stable weight shortly, at which point he will return to the available pool of regular-duty workers. Spock finds he will regret the loss; the boy is highly intelligent, a quality that Spock has lately found lacking in his interactions with both prisoners and fellow guards. Spock’s fellows are not exactly the cream of the crop; the Vulcan Penal Colony is ostensibly a proving ground, a means for underperformers to demonstrate their worth to the Empire through toil for little pay and even less respect. The best of Romulus’s youth are funnelled to the Imperial War College immediately following the culmination of their secondary education, and by rights Spock should be among them. But he did not grow up on Romulus, and Talae and Nakar are known Vulcan sympathizers. That their child should aspire to the Imperial Guard is unfortunate. Spock is well aware that this assignment is intended to discourage him, to send him creeping back to his dusty moon colony and leave the Guard to true sons and daughters of the Empire. 

And yet, the Empire does not know his greatest secret. 

He lands another uppercut to the bag. The skin of his knuckles breaks and he hisses at the pain, pulling his hand back in to inspect. A poor wrap job. He failed to bind his hand sufficiently and now green oozes out from under the tape. He peels the tape off and discards it, experiencing a flare of irritation at the forced end to his activities. He’ll have to visit the infirmary prior to the headcount and get someone to regenerate the tissue. The air outside the gym is already dry and hot, and what little perspiration Spock has produced evaporates before he reaches the sonics.

Spock hears the commotion before he sees it. There’s a crowd gathering in front of the medical tent, and Spock’s earlier irritation returns. He tamps it down and elbows through the loitering prisoners. 

“Please disperse,” he calls. “Unless you’d rather stand around staring at nothing than eat.” Some of them listen, at least. Spock stares pointedly at the guards, who seem altogether too interested in the proceedings. Reluctantly, they turn away and begin shepherding the prisoners toward the dining hall. At the center of the thinning crowd are Jarok and 06911, circling one another like snarling dogs. 

“Stop it!” Spock cries, but before his words can die in the air Jarok swings at 06911 and catches him in the mouth. 06911 flinches, tongue darting out to test the split in his lip, but he looks back up at Jarok almost immediately and crouches as if to spring at him. Spock will have no more of this. He steps between them and holds out his hands, judging the cost-benefit ratio of touch. In the end, he holds his hand out to still Jarok and takes hold of 06911’s shoulder over his uniform, careful to avoid bare skin. 06911 is hot beneath his palm; Spock can feel the bird-flutter of his chest rising and falling. He draws his shields tighter; he has no wish to hear the boy’s thoughts on the off-chance it’s even possible through cloth. 

“Stop,” Spock says again. 

Jarok makes a face, and opens his mouth as if to protest. 

“Sublieutenant,” Spock says warningly. As Unit Leader, he outranks Jarok, but only by virtue of their Commander’s preference. It’s flimsy ground to stand on, and Spock is the younger of the two of them, which only makes his seniority the bitterer to swallow. Jarok waves Spock off and steps back, shoving his hands in his pockets. 

“He’s trying to skive off regular duty,” he says. Spock thinks he sounds like a petulant child. He looks askance at 06911. 

“I’m not,” 06911 says quickly. “It’s just, I weighed in and I’m back at baseline. So I guess I’m cleared for regular duty, but...but I wanted to report to you first, finish the project. Just for today.” 

Spock might not have believed it from another prisoner, but somehow he knows 06911 is telling the truth. “Very well,” he says. He nods at the infirmary. “Go inside and clean your face. Report to me at the appointed time.” 

06911’s eyes dart to Spock’s hand, which Spock belatedly realizes is still on his shoulder. He releases him, letting his hand drop to his side. 

“You’re bleeding,” 06911 says. 

In the scuffle, Spock’s cut has opened again. He looks down at it. “Go,” he says to 06911. He does. 

When they’re alone, Spock turns to Jarok. “In the future, all such disputes should be turned over to me.” 

“Fucking Vulcan-lover,” Jarok mutters in Romulan. 

“Summarily uncreative,” Spock says tartly. “I’m disappointed.” 

“You even talk like them.” 

This veers close to insubordination, but Spock keeps his features neutral and says nothing. He wonders if it’s even true, if Jarok has ever actually heard another Vulcan speak. Spock doesn’t know if he lived off-planet before the genocide. He’s always careful to modulate his speech patterns, trying to avoid the staunch verbal precision and formality his people so strictly adhered to. It’s hard, even after seven years, even in his own head. And there’s always the bright-burning core of him, the part that fights tooth and nail for the last scraps of Vulcan, the most dangerous part of Spock. He fears it even as he nurtures its presence, a campfire in a parched forest. 

“Dismissed,” Spock says. 

Jarok hesitates for a moment, then huffs an angry sigh and stalks off. Spock sighs in kind. This was not the way he expected the morning to go. He turns his hand over. The bleeding is tapering off again, but he should have it healed anyway. The close quarters here foster disease despite the medics’ best efforts, and he cannot afford to fall ill. Inside the infirmary, Spock can see 06911 sitting on an exam table, Dr. N’Shira dabbing an antimicrobial salve on his split lip. When she’s finished, she gives 06911 leave to rise. He does so, skirting the edges of the room as he goes, studiously avoiding Spock’s eyes. 

“Nasty punch Jarok gave him,” N’Shira says as Spock takes 06911’s place on the table. She gestures at Spock’s hand. “You get in the middle of it too?” 

“I did not,” Spock says, affronted that she would assume so. She’s smiling at him, and he realizes she’s teasing. The corner of his mouth quirks upwards in return, and N’Shira grins wider. Spock’s stomach churns. These days, he does not always know what is an act and what is a reflexive emotional response. By rights, this should make things easier for him. He merely finds it disturbing. 

“He’s a good boy,” she says, nodding toward the door. 

“He is hardly an innocent,” Spock says. “He is a criminal, and old enough under Imperial law to be sentenced as an adult. I’d caution you to mind your company when expressing such opinions of prisoners.” 

Her brows draw together and she rounds her shoulders, hunching over him with the regenerator. She does not speak to him again until she’s finished, whereupon she straightens and nods at Spock, her faced closed. “There you are, Sublieutenant.” 

“Thank you, Doctor.” 

She turns away without a word. He ponders going after her, telling her he didn’t mean it, but that would be a lie. Perhaps nothing to a Romulan, but Spock avoids them when he can. He may lie with wolves, but he has some honor left.

***

“I’m sorry about earlier,” 06911 says, leaning over the flatscreen to inspect his lines of code. “Oh, here we go. I think this is what’s causing that bug. Can I--”

He insinuates a hand between Spock and the keyboard, so casually that it takes Spock aback. He steps away, giving 06911 room to work. 

He thinks back to his earlier conversation with Dr. N’Shira, of his admonishment. His statement stands. 06911 is intelligent, to be sure, and his efforts on the database project have been beneficial. But they are not equals. At the end of the day, Spock returns to his dormitory, free to come and go as he chooses. 06911 returns to a barracks full of thieves and traitors and murderers. Fewer of the latter, Spock hopes. Unit B is intended for lower-security prisoners, but occasionally they accept overflow from the violent offender units. 

“That should do it.” 06911 stands back, wiping his palms on his thighs. “Like I was saying, though, I’m sorry about earlier. About dragging you into it.” 

Spock shakes his head. “You don’t need to apologize,” he says. “I am responsible for maintaining order. Jarok’s use of violence was unacceptable. ” 

“What does it matter, though? I’m just a criminal, after all.” 

Spock fixes his eyes on the screen. He doesn’t look at 06911, though he knows he should. Despite this, Spock feels certain 06911 is smiling at him, a mean slice of a smile at his discomfort. It’s no more than what Spock deserves. He feels light years away from the brusque confidence of earlier this morning. 

“I meant only--”

“Oh no,” 06911 says. “No need to apologize. You’re just trying to maintain order.” 

Spock swallows. He turns his back on 06911, looking through the glass window to the guard outside. A word, that’s all it would take. Jarok has committed prisoners to solitary for much less. But Spock has no taste for throwing his weight around. The day passes slowly, and they do not speak again, save the occasional communication regarding the culminating database project. When Spock scans 06911’s ID chip at the end of the work period, it’s with the knowledge that he will not return tomorrow. He’s cleared for regular duty now, and Jarok oversees the work crew. Again, Spock finds himself experiencing regret at the loss of 06911’s skillset. The uncomfortable feeling is now additionally so, given the note on which they’ve ended their collaboration. 

Spock does not habitually exercise at the close of the work day, but that afternoon he spends an hour on the treadmill following his shift. He progressively increases the pace until his legs and lungs burn, until he becomes concerned for his own safety should he lose his footing. Finally, he smacks the stop button and slows to a walk, stepping off the machine on shaky legs and bending at the waist to stare at the lazily spinning floor. When he goes to bed later that evening, he falls asleep immediately and does not dream. 

The next morning, Spock wakes to his PADD chiming insistently. He has a new message from Command. The message has no subject, and Spock allows himself a brief moment of indulgence in which he imagines that it’s a transfer, or better still, a notice of acceptance to the Imperial War College. But of course, it’s neither, just a memorandum confirming Spock’s upcoming leave period. At the end, Commander Movek has requested a meeting. Spock does not wince, but it’s a near thing. He turns to look at Jarok’s bed, empty and unmade. Rising early is uncharacteristic for him, and it leaves Spock ill at ease. There is nothing for it, he thinks. He will learn the consequences of his intervention with 06911 soon enough. 

_“Kaiidth_ ,” Spock whispers, barely more than a breath. He rarely allows himself to think the Vulcan language, let alone speak it aloud. 

What is, is. 

He goes to see the Commander following the morning meal. He finds himself with an unexpected stretch of free time now that the database project is over and 06911 has returned to regular duty. There is a backlog of paperwork he should attend to, transfer orders and incident reports, but it can wait until after the meeting. 

Movek likes him. At least, Spock thinks he does. He has grown adept at recognizing such emotional attachments in others; to do so is advantageous, and if Spock derives any personal satisfaction from this knowledge no one else is the wiser. Movek also pities him, which Spock feels considerably less charitable about. “You’ve been dealt a bad hand, your parents’ politics being what they are,” he’d told Spock when he arrived nearly a year earlier. “But if you play your cards right, you stand a decent chance of getting yourself off this godforsaken planet.” 

Spock fought against the tension that rose in him at the words, belabored gambling metaphors aside. He looked up and nodded neatly at his new commanding officer. “Thank you, sir,” was all he said. 

Movek is sitting at his desk when Spock arrives at his office. He looks up as Spock moves into the doorway and waves him inside, getting up to offer the Imperial salute.

“All hail the Empire,” he says. 

“All hail,” Spock replies. 

“Please sit,” Movek says, indicating the chair placed before his desk. Spock complies, folding his hands neatly in his lap. 

“Sublieutenant Spock,” Movek begins, studying the PADD in front of him. “You’ve been quite the topic of conversation over the past day or so.” 

“Sir?” Spock’s brow furrows. He wonders if his face is displaying an appropriate level of concern. He takes a breath, attempting to slow his heart rate. _Calm yourself_ , he thinks. 

“I’m not sure why you thought it appropriate to intervene while Sublieutenant Jarok disciplined a prisoner.” 

Relief floods Spock. He’d been fairly certain that this was the impetus for their meeting, but there is always an element of concern permeating his dealings with Command. “Intervention was necessary, sir,” he says. “Sublieutenant Jarok exercised undue force in dealing with the prisoner.” 

“Jarok claims he is unpredictable and violent,” Movek says. 

Spock considers his response. Movek’s tone seems to challenge Spock to refute Jarok. He somehow doubts that a wise course of action. “I have not found that to be the case,” he says carefully. 

“Hmm.” Movek fingers the ceramic mug on the desk, picking it up and taking a long drink. Spock sometimes thinks his commander calculates these pauses. A Vulcan would never think to do such a thing, but such comparison is practically the definition of illogic under the circumstances. Movek swallows. “Tell me, do you still aspire to the War College?” 

“I do, sir.” 

“You know Command would prefer to hear the opposite.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“You’ll want to watch yourself, Spock. Are you aware of Jarok’s background?” 

Spock isn’t, but he can guess. Wherever Jarok hails from, it’s undoubtedly a more auspicious origin than his own. 

“His grandfather is a Praetor on Romulus. Command wished him to serve here for a time to gain experience, but rest assured he will advance accordingly. You, on the other hand, must rely on your own wits, the will of the Elements, and the grace of Command.” Movek’s tone makes no secret which of these is most important. 

“Understood, sir.” There is no logic in anger; there wouldn’t be even if he were Romulan. Spock knows this to be true, yet he feels anger anyway. He forces himself to look away, though doubtlessly the emotion is evident in the tense line of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. 

“At ease, Sublieutenant,” Movek says lightly. The humor is misplaced, and Movek knows it. Spock is twice the officer Jarok is, yet it is Spock who’ll be left to rot on the husk of his planet. 

“You’ll excuse me if I find your order difficult to follow, sir,” Spock says. 

“Just watch yourself with Jarok. Bide your time, and he’ll fuck off back to Romulus before you know it.” 

To be replaced by yet another privileged miscreant with more money and muscle than brains in his head, thinks Spock spitefully. His reaction surprises him. Its violence is shameful. He has become far too lax in exercising his controls; he resolves to devote additional time to strengthening them anew. 

“Spock? Are you listening?” 

He shakes his head to clear it. “Of course, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” 

“Very well,” Movek says. He watches Spock, expression inscrutable. Spock feels pinned to his seat, and he shifts as if he could deflect Movek’s gaze somehow. “You’re dismissed,” Movek says. “Oh, and I see your leave period is next month. See that you make good use of it, hmm?” 

Outside, Spock allows himself to lean against the building and heave a sigh, contemplating Commander Movek’s words. Perhaps he could stand a respite from the prison campus after all. Not that he harbors a strong desire to examine what Romulan reconstruction has wrought--far from it, in fact. But it is something different, something...not here. He will consider it. He has time yet to make concrete plans. 

Spock keeps Commander Movek’s words in mind in the days that follow. Indeed, they remain at the forefront of his mind, because it’s clear that from the moment of their altercation Jarok has set his sights on 06911. 

Now that 06911 is assigned to regular work duty, he’s under Jarok’s supervision most of the day. Spock sees how some of the guards operate, imagining petty slights on the parts of the weaker prisoners, prodding at them until they snap. Spock is under no illusions about the men of Unit B; he spoke the truth to Dr. N’Shira when he cautioned her against overidentifying with her patients, 06911 or anyone else. This does not mean, however, that he condones excessive violence or cruelty. Spock’s physical abilities have earned him the respect, and perhaps the fear, of some of the prisoners he oversees, but he will not allow himself to abuse them. Jarok does, and worse still, he encourages the other guards to do the same. 

The unit is assigned to work on the construction of a new mining facility some twenty-three miles distant, and when they exit the evening transport dusty and dragging Spock cannot help but notice that 06911 bears the dusky shadows of fresh bruises beneath the grime. 

He notices this three evenings in a row before he can tolerate it no longer. The following morning at the headcount, he calls 06911 out of the double row of prisoners lining up to await the inspection of their bunk. 

“Prisoner 06911,” Spock calls, his eyes trained on his PADD as if he’s reading the designation. 

Spock hears him first, hears the shuffle of feet against the floorboards and the front row parts briefly as 06911 ducks through, muttering an apology. He’s still thin, and Spock thinks that despite the fact that he technically meets minimum weight requirements for regular duty the boy has little room to spare. Spock shakes his head slightly; to make such observations of prisoners is imprudent at best and dangerous at worst. 06911 looks up at Spock, his eyes shadowed purple, dirty golden hair growing back. He scratches the inside of his arm. 

“Sir?” 

“I require your services this morning,” Spock says. “With me.” He inclines his head, gesturing for 06911 to leave his fellows. As expected, he balks, and a collective grumble of dissent arises from the assembly. 

“Silence,” says Spock. He looks at 06911 again. “With me,” he repeats. This time, he complies, moving to stand next to Spock at the front of the bunkroom. He casts about uncomfortably as if unsure where to look, undoubtedly conscious of how he must appear standing beside his jailors. “Dismissed,” Spock says and turns away, 06911 at his back. 

The crunch of following footsteps on gravel as they wend their way between the squat monolevel buildings is the only indication that 06911 is still behind him. The silence is distinctly stony, and Spock imagines he can feel eyes boring into his back, despite the fact that he knows this to be a physical impossibility. 

“I thought we were done here,” 06911 says when they arrive at the slightly ramshackle computer lab that serves as headquarters for the light duty projects Spock supervises. He can not vouch for Jarok’s ability to turn on one of the flatscreens, let alone implement a records management database, which is the pet project Spock has undertaken with the help of certain inmates. These inmates have, up until 06911, been theoretical. Spock deems most of the light duty inmates better suited to sorting laundry or prepping ingredients in the mess, and works on the database in his free time. 

“Upon further consideration, I have thought of several additional features to be implemented,” Spock says. “If you are amenable, I could use your expertise.” 

“I already told you,” 06911 says. “I’m no expert. I did okay in programming in school and I tooled around a little bit with some stuff of my brother’s. I don’t get why you want me to help you with this when you probably have to go back through and correct half of it.” 

“On the contrary,” Spock says. “Your code is both functionally sound and aesthetically pleasing. You are underestimating yourself, or deliberately downplaying your abilities.” 

06911 sighs. “Look, I get what you’re doing, and I...I appreciate it. But I can take care of myself, okay?” He stands up a little straighter, and Spock is put in mind of the tiny sandbirds he’d observed as a child, the way they’d fluff up their pale down indignantly when Spock strayed too close to their nests. 

“You would prefer to take your chances with Jarok?” 

“It’s not just him. You think people take kindly to me getting to lounge around in the climate controls while they’re out hauling dirt for eight hours in 120-degree heat? I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity around here, and in case you hadn’t noticed it’s kind of a rough crowd. So like I said, I appreciate it, but I think I’m better off out there.” 

Spock considers. “You are the youngest and smallest inmate currently incarcerated here. To be blunt, you can ill afford physical injury. The logical course--”

“Logical? I didn’t think Romulans went in for logic much.” 

Spock’s features are perfectly blank, but inwardly he seethes. _Stupid_ , he thinks. In seven years, he has never made so egregious a lapse in judgement. He’s incredibly fortunate this slip of the tongue occurred in the presence of a relatively insignificant witness rather than, say, Jarok. 

Spock does not respond to 06911’s comment. Rather, he turns to the flatscreen and powers it on, and proceeds to give his erstwhile workmate instructions.

They break for lunch after working most of the morning in silence as they had the last day 06911 was assigned light duty. They speak only when absolutely necessary and, in 06911’s case, more often rely only on grunts or gestures. His grudge is childlike, and Spock has little patience for it. If he would prefer not to speak, so be it. Spock will not cajole him. Indeed, silence is preferable to the ceaseless chatter certain of Spock’s colleagues insist upon when working in close proximity. 

Spock has arranged for a pair of packed lunches from the mess, much like the ones provided to the work crews who leave the prison grounds during the day. He passes one to 06911 and he nods acknowledgement, unwrapping it and beginning to eat, predictably, in silence. Spock sits with his back against the wall and does the same. 

“How’d you get stuck out here?” 

Spock nearly chokes on his mouthful of bread, so surprised is he to hear 06911 speak. 

Spock takes a sip of water, swallows it. “Pardon?” 

“I said, how’d you get stuck out here? And how old are you, anyway? You look awfully young to be in charge of a bunch of criminals.” 

Spock furrows his brow. Such conversation is ill-advised, secrets or no secrets. He has never had a problem maintaining stringent boundaries between his charges and himself. 06911 has the right idea, if Spock is honest with himself. He should order silence again, speak only when their work requires it. He does not. Later, he will spend a considerable amount of time wondering why. 

“I am 18 standard years old,” Spock says. “Why do you ask?” 

“You’re not like Jarok or the guards,” 06911 says. “You’re...different somehow. And you’re in the Guard, right? So how’d you get stuck here?” 

The hairs on the back of Spock’s neck stand on end, but he sucks in a deep breath and forces himself to relax. 06911 cannot know; he has asked an innocent question and nothing more. He blinks, holding his eyes closed a fraction of a second longer than normal. He sees the red mountain out his window, rising up from the plain. 

He opens his eyes again. “Bad luck,” he says. 

“Huh,” says 06911. He’s ripping a piece of bread into progressively smaller pieces, having eaten the rest of his food with zeal. “I guess you could say that about everyone here, couldn’t you?” 

“Indeed,” Spock says. He sighs. The lunch hour is nearly over. He should rise, return them to the task at hand. 

“I came from Tarsus,” 06911 says. “I think I told you that once before.” 

Spock nods. He recalls it from 06911’s file, accessed that first day and doomed to ricochet about Spock’s brain for the foreseeable future. Generally, Spock can exercise some measure of control over what he does or doesn’t retain, but this rule does not seem to apply where 06911 is concerned. Spock finds himself thinking of him periodically, in quiet moments and periods of activity both, a meditation or an intrusion. He is unsure which; indeed, his opinion on the matter changes from moment to moment. What does not change is his certainty that nothing good will come of this preoccupation. Nothing good at all. 

“We should--” Spock stands smoothly, gesturing at the flatscreens. 06911 follows suit, jamming the remaining bread into his mouth before leaping up and precipitating a flurry of displaced crumbs. He half-grins at Spock, brushing them off his trousers and holding out a hand as if they’ve just been introduced at a social gathering. 

“Look, I think it’s weird that I know your name and you don’t know mine, so. I’m Jim,” he says. 

Spock stares dumbly at the 06911’s--at Jim’s--outstretched hand. He feels suddenly as if he’s standing on a precipice of some kind. A phrase comes unbidden into his head, Earth language, some vestige of his mother heretofore unremembered: _l’appel du vide_. The siren call of high and windswept places, entreating him to take just one more step forward into the empty air.

But Spock is nowhere high, and he’s looking at the tips of Jim’s fingers like he’s forgotten how to speak Standard. Jim’s smile flickers, and his shoulder twitches as if to withdraw. Before he can stop himself, Spock reaches out and takes his hand. Mindful of his controls, he shakes it firmly once and lets it go. 

“Spock,” he says, although Jim already knows. The fact that “Jim” comes nowhere close to matching the name on the identification chip Spock scanned the day Jim arrived is a mystery that Spock elects to confront at some later date. After all, he is among criminals. Aliases of one kind or another are hardly unusual. 

Spock takes Jim’s request to return to regular duty at face value, though if he is honest with himself he does so against his better judgement. But Jim is correct; Spock cannot be everywhere at once, and Jim insists he stands a better chance of avoiding trouble this way. 

After their last day in the computer lab together and their inadvisable conversation, they do not speak again for several weeks, although Spock finds himself seeking Jim out when the work crews return from the construction zone in the evenings. On this particular evening, however, Spock can’t pick Jim out of the crowd. This does not concern him unduly, however, and even if it had he doesn’t have the time to dwell. For tonight marks the beginning of Spock’s quarterly leave period, and if he does not hurry he risks missing the last shuttle into the city. He shoots one last cursory glance over the dispersing prisoners and turns away, shouldering his pack and boarding the transport. 

He rests his forehead against the window and watches the cabin lights hanging reflected in the blank desert sky. He has not yet taken advantage of a leave period to go into the city, and he is unsure why he has elected to do so now, only that the prison walls seem to loom larger lately. He feels hemmed in tighter, uncomfortable in his own skin. He doubts the time away will ameliorate the feeling, yet he is going anyway. He sits up, his breath leaving a humid circle on the pane. He is surrounded by fellow...employees, he supposes is the correct term. Civilians, rather than Guard, they live in and around what Spock had once known as Shi’Kahr. If the Romulans have renamed it, he does not know. The Guard doesn’t bother with the city overly much; they have installed their own spaceport and deign to come into town only for the use of its drinking establishments and other places of ill repute. 

When the transport arrives at the Shi’Kahr spaceport, Spock steps out onto the platform with a sense of aimlessness that feels foreign to him. He has nowhere to be, nowhere he can imagine going. He should eat, he thinks idly. Perhaps this will contribute some structure to the evening. Night is falling and the desert air cools, and Spock zips his jacket as he starts down the street. The streetlamps are beginning to come on, punctuating the sidewalk at intervals with circles of yellow light. The buildings to either side of him are similarly illuminated, and the scene could almost be cozy, were Spock not wandering the streets of his decimated city. Even so, it’s easy to forget, if he allows himself to do so. The potential is troubling. 

He walks for long minutes, until he passes a promising doorway and stops, shouldering the door open. The establishment is small and dim, a few dingy tables and a long bar that’s smooth with use, hewn in wood in a nod to some misplaced rustic aesthetic. One of the tables hosts a group of Romulans, fellow Guardsmen from the look of them. There’s a certain neatness about them, right angles like the shoulders of Spock’s uniform. He’d know them anywhere. He swallows. Their presence nearly makes him turn around and leave, but he fights the compulsion to do so and takes a seat at the bar instead. Presently, the bartender emerges from a back room. She’s Orion, short and soft-looking with a shock of red hair. She smiles at him, and it reaches all the way to her eyes. Something in the obvious genuineness of the gesture eases Spock’s anxiety regarding his fellow patrons. 

“What’ll it be?” she asks, sliding a round silicone coaster in his direction. 

“Altair water,” he says. “And I’d like to see a menu.” 

She nods. “Altair water? Kinda tame for a guy on leave.” She raises an eyebrow at him. “C’mon, you Guard guys all look the same, square as hell.” 

Spock feels compelled to inform her that he is by no means a square, despite the fact that he remains unclear on the exact nature of her definition. 

“Oh no,” she says. “You’re here by yourself and you just ordered _water_. You, my friend, are a square.” 

“I am beginning to think ‘square’ has variable definitions,” Spock says. 

She laughs. “Maybe. Menu’s on the wall,” she says, gesturing at a holoscreen over the bar, which is currently rotating through a series of drink specials. Spock scans the options once the screen cycles back around to food.

“I will have the vegetarian plate,” he says. 

The bartender wrinkles her nose “You sure? It’s a bunch of flash-frozen fried stuff.” 

“In that case, perhaps a house salad.” 

“Wiser choice.” She keys the order into her PADD and takes his credit chip to swipe. “Won’t be too long. As you can see, it’s kind of a slow night. You sure you don’t want something stronger than water? Your compatriots over there seem to be fans of the ale.” 

Romulan ale is the last thing Spock wishes to imbibe. “I am certain,” he says. 

“Okay,” she says, somewhat incredulously. She turns and retreats from whence she came, leaving Spock to his thoughts and the buzz of conversation from the table of Romulans behind him. Spock leans low over the bar, hoping fervently that they won’t take notice of him. His hopes, as it turns out, are soon dashed. 

“Wait, is that--it is! Hey, Spock!” 

Spock does not cringe, but it’s a near thing. He turns slowly to see the table full of Romulans in the corner are all facing him; one in particular has his hand raised in a gesture of welcome. 

His name is Nalai, and he is the sublieutenant for Unit F. Spock trained with him upon his return to Vulcan, just after receiving his assignment. As he’d spent the training session largely attempting to avoid a state of shell-shock regarding his posting, he has no idea what Nalai thinks of him. Spock thinks, all things considered, that he is not particularly objectionable for a Romulan, though he has no interest in attempting to cultivate anything approaching friendship. Spock does not have friends. _Vulcans_ do not have friends, he thinks. Though even as he does so, the thought pricks at him, and he recalls the ease with which his fellows socialized at the small makeshift school, the conspiratorial whispers and communications transmitted clandestinely via PADD. Perhaps it is not strictly true that solitude was intrinsic to Vulcans. Intrinsic to Spock, possibly. But behind him, Nalai has not ceased speaking, and if Spock does not respond in kind his efforts to engage will only increase. 

“Nalai,” Spock says, loudly enough to be heard over the clamor of what passes for music. 

Nalai waves him over. “By the Elements, man, what are you doing sitting up there all by yourself? Get your drink, come and join us.” 

Spock finds himself in something of a bind. He can hardly remain at seated at the bar, his back to Nalai and his companions. He is unpopular among the Guard contingent at the prison, due to a combination of his own reticence and the fact that his reputation--or that of his parents--precedes him. Spock supposes he could have avoided this outcome via judicious application of social skills, but he could sooner have imagined sinking into the _loshirak_ meditation posture in the middle of the Unit B mess hall. 

He glances briefly in the direction of the bartender as if she might magic some solution, but she has retreated to the kitchen and is nowhere to be seen. He picks up his drink and approaches the table, attempting to appear less displeased. Evidently, he is successful, because Nalai grins at him and pulls a spare chair over from an adjacent table. 

“What are you drinking? Is that that delchu moonshine?” 

The correct term is _d’lechu_ , but Spock will not correct Nalai no matter how he bristles at his mangling of the Vulcan word. “Water,” he says, shaking his head. 

“Boring,” Nalai says. “Aren’t you on leave? Get rid of that, will you? Here, we have a whole pitcher.” 

Spock’s attempts to protest are summarily waved away, and despite a collective grumbling from Nalai’s tablemates an extra glass is procured, filled to the brim with electric blue liquid, and placed in front of Spock on the table. 

“The Empire’s finest,” says Nalai, waving his hand with a little flourish. He raises his glass, and the others follow suit, Spock included. “All hail!” 

“All hail,” they chorus in response. Nalai clips Spock’s glass with his own and takes a sip, which Spock hurriedly matches. He tries to disguise his wince of distaste with a cough, but the Romulan to his left catches him out and laughs. 

“Strong stuff, isn’t it?” he says. 

Spock nods. “Yes,” he says. The ale tastes like nothing he’s ever had before, oddly fruity and bitter. He wonders vaguely about the mechanics of the brewing process. 

“So, Spock,” Nalai says. “What brings you here? I don’t think I’ve seen you step foot outside the gate since we began training.” 

Spock glances around the table, uncomfortable with the prospect of being the center of conversational attention. However, it appears Nalai’s companions have grown bored of him already and returned to their own conversation. Now that he finds himself Nalai’s focus, he is unsure which is worse. Nalai watches him with a disconcerting intensity, and Spock has the distinct sensation that his responses will be weighed and measured for a purpose he can not yet discern. 

“I have much to keep me busy within,” Spock says. “I have not yet truly had the time to spare for exploration, regardless of the availability of leave time.” 

“Well, you’ve been missing out. This place is the best. Cheap drinks, and close to the...entertainment district, if you take my meaning.” 

Spock isn’t completely sure he does, but he elects to avoid revealing his confusion. “I see,” he says, taking another sip of his drink. Luckily for him, the bartender brings his salad then, although its arrival represents yet another double-edged sword. Perhaps he should have chosen the fried food after all, as the entire table seems to have paused mid-sentence to look askance at his plate. 

“Greener than blood,” one of them quips. 

“I am trying to…” 

“Eat more vegetables, yes?” Nalai says smoothly. “Commendable. Perhaps you should consider doing the same, Ibak.” Ibak is the largest man at the table, and Nalai looks him up and down, making it abundantly clear he notices. 

Ibak snorts. “No, thank you. If the universe sees fit to strike me down, at least I’ll go to my grave knowing I lived well.” He regards Spock’s meal with obvious distaste. 

“Do not mind him,” Nalai says to Spock. “He suffers from chronic ill-humor.” 

Spock declines his head, turning his attention to his plate. He does not look up again until he has finished eating, though to his relief the buzz of conversation resumes around him. Only Nalai still watches him. Spock looks up momentarily, meets his eye briefly and without meaning to before he lets his gaze slide back down to the vegetal mess on his plate. He is unsure what Nalai means by this show of camaraderie, and he feels uneasy. 

He is willing to concede, however, that this may be a side effect of the ale. 

“You work with Jarok,” Nalai says presently. “How do you find him?” 

Spock swallows his final bite of food and considers. Nalai is skating close to truly dangerous territory, now, and part of Spock cannot help but succumb to paranoia. The Guard contingent at the prison is not as large as it might have once seemed; everyone is at least peripherally aware of everyone else and, once formed, others’ opinions are difficult to shed. Jarok has always been as popular as Spock has solitary, though whether this attention stems from genuine interest or the hope of advancement by proxy Spock cannot say. He opens his mouth, becomes aware that he still has no idea what to say, shuts it again. 

“ _Mogai_ got your tongue?” Nalai says, raising an eyebrow at him. He waves a hand dismissively. “Forget it, I know what you’re doing. Not so smart to talk out of both sides of your mouth, is it? Not with someone like Jarok.” 

“I hear he holds a grudge,” Spock says. _Whether or not it’s deserved,_ he thinks, remembering Jim. 

“I’ve heard the same. One of the _duhlan_ from my unit knew him back on Romulus, said he was insufferable. He almost didn’t make it into the Guard at all; his grandfather had to call in more than one favor.” 

The corners of Nalai’s mouth twitch up and his eyes sparkle--amusement, Spock realizes. He feels a peculiar sense of pleasure at the realization that Nalai apparently shares Spock’s rather low estimation of Jarok. Unbecoming of a Vulcan, surely, but here in the shell of his city Spock somehow does not feel especially Vulcan at all. 

“He is needlessly violent,” Spock says quietly, careful of the others at the table. “He conducts himself dishonorably.” 

Nalai nods, appearing thoughtful. “I have wondered how the two of you fare together,” he says. 

“We manage,” Spock says, taken aback at the thought that Nalai wonders about him in any capacity. “In any case, Jarok will likely return to Romulus in due course, effectively putting an end to any potential conflict our partnership has engendered.” 

“That’s awfully passive,” Nalai says. 

Spock shrugs. “I have little choice in the matter.” 

“And what of you? What will you do, when you are finished here?” 

Nalai’s question is a strange one; they are all of them ultimately beholden to the whims of Command. The best of them will be sent to the War College, destined for the officers’ ranks, or perhaps for senate seats or praetorships, though a praetor from the outer colonies would be unusual to say the least. Others will be shuffled around amongst other colonies, hopefully those with passingly better quality of life than a barren and battle-scarred prison planet. However, some of them will surely remain on Vulcan for the entirety of their somewhat underwhelming careers. 

This last possibility scarcely bears thinking about; Spock cannot imagine what he will do should it become apparent that that is his destiny. Desert, possibly. Flee back to Talae and Nakar on Lunus and farm for the rest of his days, until he--well. _That_ certainly doesn’t bear thinking about. 

“I do not know what lies ahead for me,” he says, because it is the truth. “What will you do?” 

Nalai draws himself up. “I’m bound for the War College,” he says. “If they’ll have me, anyway. Commander Movek thinks I have a chance. They’ll be here scouting next year, you know. They last came just before we got here for training.” 

Spock nods. The knowledge incites a clutching sensation in the vicinity of his chest. Anger wars with hope inside him, alongside the ever-present overlay of shame at his decreasing ability to suppress his emotions. He thinks of Talae, of the long hours they’d spent together after their flight from Vulcan. She had had next to no concept of how to properly raise a Vulcan child, let alone one recovering from psychic trauma. Would she be pleased to see him lapse? Would she see it as a failure at all, or a step in the right direction? 

“You are half human,” she told him once. “Should it not be easier for you to relax your controls?” 

Spock considered her question. Perhaps it had been, once, before years of training coupled with a dogged determination to be just as any full Vulcan child, if he could not be better. 

Even now he meditates, attempting to sift through layer upon layer of stratified controls, carefully constructed webs of steely lace in his mind. He imagines how it might be to undo them one by one, unspool himself and be as the Romulans are, easy with a laugh and a fist. Certainly, it would be easier for him to do so. It’s just that he cannot conceive of how, how even to differentiate between conscious and unconscious action or between an act and a true feeling. The Vulcans of old took up Surak’s teachings as a life raft, an attempt to keep afloat above blood and sex and war and savagery. A part of Spock, the same part that would have run screaming after his parents to join them in death, wonders just how far above the dark water he hangs, and what there is to find in the depths. The rest of him has an inkling they are bottomless. Better to take his chances with duality. 

Spock’s glass is empty, and Nalai picks it up and holds it to the murky lamplight. “Another?”

At the other end of the table, Nalai’s friends are rising. “Come on,” one of them says. Spock thinks his name is Tevel, a _duhlan_ from Unit C. “I’m bored of this dump. I want to go see who’s on at the _a’sim-kelek_ tonight.” He leers, teeth shining slimily. He nods at the bartender, who looks up but makes a show of ignoring him. “Wish she’d take a side job or two,” he says loudly enough that she cannot miss hearing him. Spock sees her shoulders stiffen for a beat before she continues cleaning a glass too delicate for the washer. 

“You forget yourself, Tevel,” Nalai says, eyes shifting to Spock again. “You’re outranked.” 

The group laughs. Spock merely looks down at the table, turning his coaster in slow circles on the dark surface. 

“Even so, I don’t think that’s Tevel’s worst idea,” says Ibak. “I don’t know about you, Nalai, but it’s been awhile since I got mine wet. And they’ve got that hot little white-haired piece, that new girl…” 

Spock turns away, unable to completely hide his distaste. 

Ibak snorts. “What, are we offending your delicate sensibilities, Sublieutenant?” 

Spock does not answer. He picks up his dishware and carries it to the bar, depositing it wordlessly before the bartender, who smiles her thanks at him. He turns back to the table. “I believe I should be going, as you appear to have plans elsewhere,” he says. He nods at Nalai, who is not entirely responsible for the repellent behavior of his companions, and turns to leave the bar. 

Outside, the air is cooler still than it was when Spock arrived, and he tugs the collar of his jacket upright, for what little additional protection this affords him. He considers his options. There’s a late transport back to the prison, typically used by the incoming Gamma shift staff, but if he wishes to take it he has several hours to while away. No, better to find lodging for the night and depart on the first shuttle of the morning. He is deciding which direction to depart in when the door to the bar swings open and Nalai bursts onto the street. 

“Good,” he says. “I thought you’d gone.” 

“I have,” Spock says. 

Nalai frowns. “Don’t. Stay here and have another drink with me.” 

“Your friends--”

“Let them go. I don’t--I’m not much for that kind of thing anyway,” Nalai says, and looks at the ground, the tips of his ears going green in the light from the bar windows. Spock realizes how young he is; perhaps they are even of an age. He hesitates, biting his lower lip. He is not sure what makes him agree to Nalai’s invitation; he knows only that he does, that he follows Nalai back inside, ignoring the muttered gibes and the rough way the others shoulder past them as they leave. 

“Do you know them well?” Spock asks, eyeing the exit. Nalai has procured a second pitcher of ale, though Spock thinks the quantity rather optimistic given that there are only two of them. More patrons come in, pairs and trios. Locals, from the looks of them, though of course they are not truly locals at all.

“Not particularly. We met a few months ago and we’ve tried to coordinate leave periods since that time.” He shrugs. “It’s preferable to dragging oneself around the city alone.” 

“You could remain in your dormitory at the prison,” Spock says. “You are not required to take leave.” 

“I could go completely mad, you mean. Don’t you feel it, after awhile? That you are a prisoner there yourself?” 

Spock takes a drink. “I prefer to focus my energies more productively, where possible. However...I concede that the environment is, at times, trying.” 

Nalai snorts into his glass. “Trying is right,” he says. “The guards are no better than the inmates, half the time, and my _duhlan_ \--Tevel, you met him earlier--is hopeless. He’s like your Jarok, friends and relatives in high places.” He presses his palms to the table, extending his fingers and then clutching them into fists as he speaks. “Sometimes I--”

He cuts himself off with a shake of his head, and does not elaborate further. 

They sit in silence after that. Spock drains his glass and lets Nalai pour him another, watching the tendons flex in his pale wrist as he holds the pitcher steady. The room is starting to grow soft around the edges, smudging at the corners of Spock’s field of vision. But he feels warm and settled in a way he can’t quite place, and for a moment he allows himself to slip into a waking dream, an alternate reality in which he is not himself, in which he is Romulan-born and destined for great things. He will feel ashamed of these thoughts later, and he will remind himself that there is no such thing as destiny, but for now this chair is the most comfortable he has ever been in, and Nalai’s face in the odd, greenish light is a sight so captivating Spock does not think he will ever wish to look away. 

“So,” Nalai says. “Do you hear much from Lunus?” 

The question rousts Spock from his reverie, and he sits up straighter, the motion making his head swim. 

They’d decided early on that it was best to keep contact to a minimum. Perhaps it was arrogant to ascribe such importance to Spock’s presence in Talae and Nakar’s lives, but if life in the Star Empire taught Spock one thing, it was that one could not underestimate the degree to which one’s behavior could be monitored. 

In the early days of Romulan colonization, Talae and Nakar had arrived on Vulcan relatively fresh-faced and forward-thinking. Perhaps, they thought, this was an opportunity for a reunion, a knitting of the break that had occurred all those thousands of years ago. 

“We were delusional,” Nakar later told him, sitting around the fire on Lunus, pushing a crust listlessly around his empty plate. Spock remembered the night well: his thirteenth birthday, an auspicious one according to Romulan tradition. Nakar presented him with a cup of wine and poured one for himself, clinking their clayware tumblers together before nodding at Spock and watching solemnly as he took his first sip of the tart red liquid. 

“You are a man now,” Nakar said. “Though I suspect you left boyhood behind some time ago.” 

“I...I do not hear from them often,” Spock says to Nalai. “I receive communications periodically, but there has been little of note.” 

Nalai nods. “Must’ve been exciting, growing up on the frontier. Forging the glory of the Empire in blood and fire,” he says dramatically, sounding like a recruitment holo. “Meanwhile I was stuck in Rateg bored out of my skull.” 

By rights, his complaint should anger Spock. Once, he would have traded anything to be back in his room in Shi’Kahr, to be so ignorant of an alternative as to be bored. But now he is only faintly amused. Curious. “Something tells me colonists are not immune to boredom, either. Perhaps that is why we joined the Guard.” 

Nalai grins. “Perhaps.” 

By the time they finish the pitcher, Spock has begun to feel as if his internal organs are floating about inside of him. The sensation is most disconcerting, as is the way he sways on his feet as they stand, the way he reaches automatically for the back of the chair to steady himself. 

“Whoa,” says Nalai. “I suppose we did drink quite a bit, didn’t we.” He steps closer, taking hold of Spock’s elbow. Spock flinches, and for a moment he is poised to wrench his arm away, but then Nalai runs his thumb over the cloth of Spock’s tunic. It’s such a small movement, barely perceptible, but Spock feels as if he’s been hit over the head. 

“What--”

Nalai lets go of Spock’s arm, letting his own fall to his side. He smiles at Spock lopsidedly, and Spock thinks he hasn’t seen another being smile so much in a very long time, perhaps ever. 

“Are you well?” Nalai asks. 

Spock swallows. “I...yes,” he says. 

“Where are you staying? Shall I walk you there?” 

Spock recalls his earlier plan, to eat a simple meal and procure a hotel room for the evening. No doubt he would have passed the night looking over the code from the database project, or reading through the volume of Romulan military history he has on his PADD or something equally safe and mundane. How far he has strayed from either of those descriptors now. 

“I have nowhere to stay,” he says. “That is to say, I planned to find a room following the evening meal, before--”

“Before I showed up and ruined your well-laid plans for the night?” 

Spock smiles at this. He cannot help himself; it seems to well up from within him such that he cannot restrain it. “Precisely.” 

“Well, come along then,” says Nalai. “I’ll take you to my hotel. It’s no five-star pleasure planet resort, but it’s clean and cheap. And not too far from here, since it seems as if you’re going to have a rough go of walking.” 

Spock cannot refute this last statement. He supposes he has this reduction in motor control to blame for the way he stumbles into Nalai as they both step into the narrow doorway at the same moment, the way he allows Nalai to take his elbow again and hold it as they start off down the street. 

“It’s just this way,” Nalai says, nudging Spock into a right turn with his shoulder. Halfway down the next block Spock stumbles on an uneven patch of road and nearly goes down completely, Nalai grabbing at him and dragging him upright again. Spock lurches against him, and barely has time to think about just how close they are before Nalai takes his wrist loosely between thumb and forefinger, holding it up as if he wants to show Spock something. Spock tries to pull back, his fingers splaying, but then Nalai brushes his index and middle finger carefully against Spock’s.

Spock’s mouth falls open, and he thinks it’s something of a mercy that the alcohol has both blunted his controls and seemingly slowed his reaction time, so that before the barrage of Nalai’s thoughts reaches his brain he has half a second to realize it’s coming. 

He avoids touch as a general rule; Romulans are not touch telepaths, having eschewed telepathy when they parted ways with Vulcans and theoretically evolved accordingly. There are rumors of a secret class of Romulan adepts who follow Vulcan tradition to unknown ends; Spock shudders to think of such abilities in the hands of the Tal-Shiar. But of all the cultural mores Spock has been forced to subsume or discard over the years since his planet was effectively destroyed, this has proven the most difficult. Romulans’ lack of telepathic ability notwithstanding, Spock cannot shake the fear, however unfounded, that when he touches another all his secrets brim and bleed across his surface as surely as others’ do theirs. So he shields, almost always, and he does not touch if he can help it. 

Now, however, he finds that he cannot help it. What’s more, he is beginning to suspect that he does not want to. Nalai runs his fingers along the side of Spock’s forefinger, dips into the soft well of the web between Spock’s hand and thumb. He’s biting his bottom lip, and Spock’s is still hanging open like an _aluk_ ’s. 

Nalai nods at something up the street, and Spock attempts to follow his line of sight. “It’s up here. The hotel, I mean,” Nalai says. Their hands are still touching; Spock is not sure he will be able to think clearly again until that ceases to be the case. 

“Listen, if it’s preferable to...that is, if you’re amenable, you can stay with me tonight.” Nalai inhales sharply. “To...save the credits.” 

“I have plenty of credits.” Spock knows as soon as he speaks that this was the wrong thing to say, but Nalai simply laughs and rubs his thumb over a callus on the fourth finger of Spock’s right hand. 

“I know,” he says. He tugs at Spock’s hand. “Come.” 

The hotel is small, though it’s the warm and comfortable kind of small Spock’s mother used to refer to as “cozy.” She often chose to apply the term to their cramped, messy cottage, but Spock supposes this place is closer to its true definition. Yellow light fills the anteroom directly inside the doorway, and the stoutish Romulan woman behind the desk reminds him of Talae. 

Nalai holds up his key card, and Spock doesn’t miss the the proprietress raise an eyebrow at them as she turns away. He draws in a breath, consciously countering his vasodilation mechanisms so as not to flush, not that he supposes it really matters, as Nalai’s cheeks are green and Romulans seem not to care about such things. Nalai gestures at a set of stairs ahead of them. 

“No lift,” he says. “This way.” He tightens his grip on Spock and they pelt up the stairs like children. Caught by the hand like this, Spock has no choice but to follow in Nalai’s wake down the long hall, feet padding on the plush carpeting. Nalai stops at a door and spins around too quickly for Spock to back up, so that he finds himself with his arms full of this lithe, perplexing Romulan, so vigorous and so inexplicably interested in him. Nalai pulls Spock to him and twines their fingers together again, pitching his head back against the door to expose a greenish-white expanse of throat. Spock has the sudden and unprecedented desire to put his mouth to the hollow of Nalai’s jugular notch, to fit his mouth to it and taste. 

Nalai fumbles with the key card, finally sliding it home and staggering against Spock as the door slides open. The room is small, though not as small as the rooms in the capsule hotels, one of which Spock would likely have found himself crawling into tonight had things gone differently. Directly inside the door to the right is the fresher, before them another short set of stairs up to the sleeping platform. There is a brief moment in which the influence of the ale seems to draw back, and Spock finds himself blinking in the low light, keenly aware of his bladder. 

“I’ll--” He drops his pack and gestures to the fresher. Nalai nods, flopping onto the armchair tucked beneath the lofted sleeping platform and sliding out his comm unit. Spock wonders if he will contact his companions, and if so what he will say. He hopes fervently that Ibak’s white-haired girl was nowhere to be found tonight. 

When he’s finished relieving himself, Spock turns and inspects himself in the mirror. His cheeks are splotchy with green, a fact Spock is somewhat horrified to realize he was completely unconscious of, perhaps a side effect of alcohol consumption. He grins widely at his reflection, imagining how it might feel to be so easy with a smile as Nalai is. He cannot shake the feeling that the expression looks completely foreign on his face, and he relaxes into his familiar neutral expression before washing his hands in the sonics and returning to the bedroom. 

Nalai is still sitting in the chair, though his eyes are closed and his communicator is nowhere to be seen. He looks up when Spock comes back into the room, heavy-lidded. 

“I am tired,” he says. “That ale was nothing to sneer at, was it?” 

“No,” Spock says, feeling somewhat at a loss. He kneels and opens his pack, retrieving his sleepwear and standing up again, unsure what to do next. He’s struck by the impulse to turn around, though he knows it’s a ridiculous one. He yanks his shirt off over his head, knowing as he does so that Nalai has looked up to watch. When Spock wriggles free of the garment, his eyes meet Nalai’s for a long moment before he drops his gaze to fiddle with the fastening at his waistband. 

“Are you going to bed?” Nalai asks.

It’s an odd question; there’s not much else to do in such close quarters. The room is unequipped with a holoscreen or music player of any kind, and Spock does not take Nalai for the reading type, at least not under the immediate circumstances. “I...yes, I suppose so.” 

“D’you mind if I join you?” 

“The chair is hardly suitable for sleeping,” Spock says by way of an answer. He removes his trousers and replaces them with the softer, flimsier pants he wears to sleep in. The room is warm, so he elects to leave his shirt off. He climbs up into the sleeping loft and studies the ceiling in the half-light as he listens to the small sounds Nalai makes as he moves about the room getting ready for bed. 

Finally, his face appears at the top of the ladder and he slides in next to Spock, rolling over onto his side to face him. 

“Hello,” he says softly. 

Spock’s thrums in his side, and he feels certain Nalai can hear it, sense his agitation. “Hello.” 

He is unsurprised when Nalai reaches for his hand again, and this time Spock is able to shield preemptively. He wonders if this is what Nalai feels when he touches Spock, mind blank but for the hum and spark of sensory neurons transmitting each drag of fingers across Spock’s skin. They lie side by side. Spock’s eyes are closed, but presently Nalai reaches up and runs a hand over them, and Spock abruptly realizes he has come so close that Spock can feel hot breath on his cheek. 

“Do you trust me?” Nalai says. 

Spock bites his lower lip and nods. 

“Then look at me.” 

Spock complies. There is a dusting of greenish freckles across Nalai’s nose and a pearly scar just above his upper lip. He continues to look as, without pretense, Nalai takes Spock’s hand and lifts it to his mouth, nipping lightly at the pad of Spock’s index finger before closing his lips around Spock’s fingertip. Spock is unable to keep himself from crying out, and Nalai laughs around Spock’s finger, sliding it from his mouth while taking hold of Spock’s wrist so he can’t move away. 

“Have you ever done this before?” 

“No,” Spock whispers. 

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” 

Spock nods against the pillow, letting his eyes close again. “Yes.” 

Nalai resumes his ministrations, sliding closer to Spock on the bed so that their bodies are nearly flush. He brings his free hand around to the back of Spock’s head, running fingers through his hair and scratching his nails lightly over Spock’s scalp. Through his haze of pleasure, Spock has the vague idea that he should reciprocate, though the thought of taking Nalai’s fingers into his own mouth is nothing if not daunting. He reaches for the hand around his wrist, trying to pry it off, but the action seems incongruously violent and he settles for rubbing his thumb in small circles over one of Nalai’s knuckles. Nalai doesn’t seem to mind, though, moaning around Spock’s fingers in his mouth and, in a flurry of motion that Spock finds somewhat stunning, slings a leg over Spock’s body to press them even closer. Spock can feel Nalai hard against his hip, and this blatant evidence of arousal shocks him. As if their bodies are somehow connected, Spock feels an answering heaviness in his own groin, and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he reaches down between them he’ll find himself hard as well. 

“Here,” Nalai mutters, letting Spock’s fingers fall free. “Like this--” 

He reaches down and grips Spock under the knee, yanking on his leg encouragingly until Spock brings it up to fit snugly between Nalai’s. Their bodies make a hot trap of friction; the thin fabric of their sleeping pants allows for just enough contact to simultaneously tantalize and madden. Spock has touched himself before, of course, more times than he cares to remember and not without some measure of...internal conflict, if not precisely shame. But it’s never been like this, this frustrating or this good, and Spock feels pinned here by Nalai’s mouth, by his legs. 

“Touch me,” Nalai says, “Come on, please.” 

He thrusts against Spock’s hip as if to tell him where. Spock takes a breath and slides his hand down between them, into the humid warmth beneath Nalai’s waistband. For one horrible moment, he freezes, suddenly certain that this will be his undoing, that for all their apparent similarities it is here that their bodies will diverge. 

_Breathe_ , Spock thinks, remembering that of course he has seen Nakar without clothing, as well as Jarok in their shared quarters, and that he could discern no obvious difference between them. Indeed, when Spock forces himself to move again and wraps his hand gingerly around Nalai, he is somewhat relieved to find it feels familiar. Now it’s Nalai’s turn to cry out, which Spock notes with a measure of satisfaction. 

Spock is unsure quite how to go about things, so he attempts to replicate the methods he himself finds most pleasurable. It seems to work, because Nalai pitches forward, burying his face at the juncture of Spock’s neck and shoulder and letting Spock’s hand fall from his mouth, forgotten. Spock does not mind, though; he has Nalai’s leg to buck and grind against, and it doesn’t take very much momentum at all to send their bodies into a call and response of pleasure. Spock presses himself into Nalai’s hip; Spock’s hands work Nalai over. The balance of power, if one could refer to it as such, has shifted. The room feels electric with it as Nalai huffs hotly onto the thin skin over Spock’s clavicle as if he could fog it up like a windowpane. He gives a high little whine and nips at Spock’s neck. 

“I’m--” 

Abruptly, Nalai’s body stiffens and a warm wetness spills over Spock’s hand. The realization of what he’s wrought is enough to send Spock spinning over the edge himself and his last thought as his orgasm seizes him is that he has ruined his pants.

***

“You were always so quiet, before,” Nalai says. “During training, I mean. You used to sit there in the mess and eat like an android; you never spoke to anyone.”

Spock shrugs. He supposes Nalai can feel it; they are shoulder to shoulder on the bed. They have undressed, lifting slim hips to shuck off their pants and lie together. Spock drifts close to sleep, the drag of the alcohol and the excitement of the day conspiring. He allows his shields to slip just the barest fraction, and feels a surge of warmth and contentment from Nalai that takes him aback even as it compels him further. But it feels dangerous to read another’s thoughts this way, not to mention impolite, so Spock reigns himself in again and considers Nalai’s statement. 

“I believe I might still be characterized that way,” he says wryly, thinking of Nalai’s friends. 

“No, you’re...there’s something different. And not only this.” Nalai nudges Spock’s hip with his own. “There’s always been something about you, it’s why--” 

He stops himself, the shake of his head whispering against the pillow, and Spock does not press him. He lets silence fall, and before long sleep comes with it to carry them both off. 

Spock dreams. He dreams of the prisoner Jim, of all things. Jim is sitting on the stone bench outside Spock’s family’s cottage, and it looks just as it did in the days _before_ , so much so that Spock feels certain that if he went inside he would find his mother sitting at the table drinking tea. But now Jim is here, inexplicably, sitting on the bench and swinging his legs, and he seems younger than Spock knows him to be. 

“She’s not here,” Jim says. 

“Pardon?” 

“Your mom.” 

Spock doesn’t respond, just sits beside Jim on the bench. Jim leans back on his hands, regarding Spock with a curious expression. 

“What is it?” Spock says. 

“Oh, nothing. I was just kind of shocked, is all.” 

“Shocked? By what?” 

“I don’t know, maybe that you spent the whole night hanging out with a bunch of Romulans, acting all sympatico?” 

Spock frowns. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.” 

“Uh huh.” 

“You should not even be here,” Spock says. “You do not know about any of this.” 

“Maybe I don’t,” Jim says. “But what I do know is, you wouldn’t catch me dead raising a glass with anyone from Tarsus, human or Romulan. Whatever happened to honor?” 

Spock straightens. “I have no dearth of honor, I assure you.” 

“If you say so.” 

Spock turns away, looks off toward the mountains. He can smell woodsmoke overlain with the rich scent of cooking. He wonders if Jim is absolutely certain Spock’s mother is not at home. 

_This is different,_ Spock thinks. This business with Nalai is...not a question of honor. 

_If you say so._

When Spock turns back, Jim is gone. 

Spock wakes the following morning with a splitting pain in his head and hair matted with sweat. Nalai lies beside him, face down and head covered with the pillow, and he merely grunts semiconsciously as Spock clambers over him and climbs down the ladder to the fresher. The sonics do little to clear his head, so he switches the tap on and pours himself a glass of water, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. When he emerges from the fresher, Nalai is sitting up in bed, looking equally bleary. 

“Good morning,” Nalai says. “I thought for a moment you’d vanished.” 

“No,” says Spock, becoming belatedly aware he is stating the obvious. “I was only in the fresher.” 

Nalai tilts his head owlishly to one side. “Come back to bed,” he says, running the flat of one hand over the crisp white sheets.

The scene is tempting, to be certain. But in the light of morning Spock feels as if part of him has seized up, trepidation dense and achy in his limbs like scar tissue. He shakes his head. “I must return,” he says. 

“Already? But you’re not due back until tomorrow evening, correct?” 

“Correct,” Spock says. Their leave periods are clearly scheduled similarly; there is no point in lying. 

“Then why return?” 

Spock does not know how to answer. None of the options are particularly appealing, illogical as they would sound even to Romulan ears. _I had a dream about a prisoner and am now disquieted_ , while true, hardly seems appropriate. 

“I always intended to return this morning. Accordingly, I scheduled a meeting with Commander Movek regarding a...project I wish to implement within my unit.” 

It seems to Spock the flimsiest of lies, but Nalai merely nods and flops supine onto the pillows once more. “Suit yourself, then.” He closes his eyes and Spock thinks him asleep as he dresses in silence and readies himself to depart. He crosses to the door and has his finger on the touchpad when he thinks better of it, and turns back to find Nalai looking at him again, having rolled onto his side. 

“Thank you for yesterday evening,” Spock says hesitantly. “I found it...elucidating.” 

Nalai snorts. “Am I to take that as a compliment?” 

“Nalai--”

“I am teasing you,” Nalai says, slow and soft as one speaks to a child. In another context, this might have irritated Spock, but now he walks back across the room and reaches for Nalai’s hand beneath the sheet to brush their fingers together once more. 

“Goodbye,” Spock says. 

“There’s no need to be so solemn about it. Here, my listing’s in the directory; comm me when you’ve got an evening free. And there’s always next leave.” 

Spock is unsure whether he intends to take another leave period any time soon, but perhaps he can be persuaded. He nods. “Very well,” he says. “Enjoy the remainder of your time off.” 

“Mmm. Now that you’re going I think I may just sleep the day away. Maybe go see a holo later.” 

This seems a distinctly unproductive use of time to Spock, but he does not say so.

As he leaves the hotel and steps out into the street, he blinks into the harsh light. The air grows warm already, and he’s glad for the sun on his back as he starts up the street to the shuttleport. His headache throbs behind his eyes, and now that he is no longer in Nalai’s presence he is somehow better able to shield from the pain. There is a correlation here that Spock is uncomfortable dwelling on, and he watches his feet as he walks. 

By the time he’s caught the shuttle and returned to the prison, morning has ebbed into afternoon. The work crews are gone per usual; the free population of the Empire might enjoy a day of leisure, but not so the incarcerated. Spock returns to his quarters before signing back in; Jarok is predictably nowhere to be found, as he is assigned to supervise the crews at the offsite mining development. Spock unpacks, undresses, and retires to the showers. Vulcan is dry as she ever was, water strictly conserved, and as he stands under the sonics he finds himself wishing for the tattoo beat of a real shower. Lunus, for all her sleepy backwater qualities, had no shortage of potable water, and Spock had at times luxuriated in this fact. He finishes in the sonics and shuts them off, then returns to his room and dresses in his uniform once more. He has nearly 5 hours before the majority of the prisoners return. Perhaps, he thinks, he will remain here in repose until then. He attempts resting meditation, alone as he is in the room, and experiences marginal success. Each time his mind clears, images of the previous night intrude unbidden: a flash of skin, crisp sheets pulled taught, the twitch and grasp of limbs. His sojourn with Nalai was unwise, Spock thinks. And yet, he cannot pretend he would wish it away. The contradiction is perplexing. 

Spock does not think consciously of Jim until he is standing in sight of the prison gates, shifting from foot to foot in an unbecoming manner. It is then that he realizes he has been awaiting this moment all day, though he cannot say precisely why. The transport pulls in and the crew flows out, dogged at the heels by Jarok and his brace of guards. Spock watches and waits, unable to stop himself from scanning the crowd for Jim. When the last man steps off the transport and makes for the mess, Spock feels a prick of concern he tries vainly to squelch. The feeling persists to such a degree that, by the time Spock has left the docked transport behind and gone into the mess, he has reached a state of marked agitation. Rather than address Hikaru Sulu vocally, Spock strides up behind him in the dinner line and grasps his shoulder. Sulu turns, brow furrowed. 

“Please disclose the location of Prisoner 06911,” Spock says. 

Sulu appears confused. “You...you didn’t hear?” 

Spock should perhaps at least attempt to feign nonchalance, but he does not have the patience. He shakes his head. “I do not--”

“He’s in the infirmary,” Sulu spits. “Jarok put him there yesterday.” 

“Elaborate,” Spock says tersely. He casts about the mess hall; Jarok is notably absent. 

Sulu shrugs. “It was before dinner. They got crosswise over something. I didn’t hear what it was, but Jim can be...well, he’s got kind of a mouth on him. All I know is one minute everything’s normal, the next Jarok pulls him out of line and he’s down on the ground, and--” He shakes his head, clearly declining to continue. His throat bobs reflexively, and his face seems to darken at the memory. 

“And you say he is in the infirmary now?” 

“Yeah, at least that’s where they took him last night.” 

Spock nods. “Thank you, 07--Mr. Sulu.” He turns and strides from the mess, and he thinks it a mark of supreme restraint that he does not break into a run until he is well clear of the building. 

Anger, thinks Spock, was perhaps the emotion about which Surak had the most to say. After all, Vulcans had adopted logic as a counterpoint to an age of blood and war, in which vicissitude reigned and the whim of a moment regularly ended lives. Of the myriad emotions that roiled beneath the austere surface of ideal Vulcan control, anger was the most destructive. As Spock eschews the lift to take the stairs to his quarters two at a time, as he flings the door open and crosses the room, spins Jarok around to face him and lifts him up against the wall by the throat, he decides anger is also the most satisfying emotion to indulge. If he must lose control, let it be this way: let him give himself over to the white hot rightness of Jarok’s blood beating under his fingers, the wild fear in his eyes. 

_“What have you done?”_ Spock says, not bothering to keep his voice level.

Little flecks of spittle accost Jarok’s cheek. He tries and largely fails to swallow; Spock feels the spasm beneath his fingers. Jarok’s hands have flown automatically to Spock’s wrists, fingers prying futilely at the tendons in an effort to loosen his grip. Spock relents, softening his hold just slightly, enough to allow Jarok to slide down the wall and stand under his own power. 

“What are you talking about?” Jarok replies, voice rough. He tries to slide his fingers beneath Spock’s to rub at his throat, but Spock bats his hand away. The feel of Jarok’s fingers where Nalai’s have so recently been is jarring.

“You know.” 

When Jarok speaks again, he allows a hint of his customary mocking tone to creep into his words. Audacious, Spock thinks, with a hand about your throat. 

“Why do you trouble yourself so for the sake of a scrawny _hevam_?” He raises an eyebrow, perhaps in imitation of Spock. “He is pretty, though, isn’t he? I suppose I can’t blame you.” 

“If you do not cease speaking I will crush your larynx without further hesitation,” Spock says. 

“And singlehandedly condemn yourself to death for treason? For I can guarantee that will be the verdict. Or were you unaware of my connection to the praetorate? Besides, you’re the one asking the questions, unless they are merely rhetorical.” 

“You behave abhorrently and hide behind your family’s name,” Spock says. “This is the height of dishonor.” 

“I suspect our definitions may diverge. Mine does not extend to smart-mouthed _Terrhasu_ thieves who’d steal the Empire out from under our noses if they had the means. Or have you forgotten your oath of service in your zeal to avenge your friend?” 

“He is not my friend.” Spock drops his hand, and Jarok uses his newfound freedom to slouch against the wall and cross his arms over his chest with infuriating casualness. Spock’s righteous anger dies down to an ineffectual smolder, and he finds himself wishing dearly to strike Jarok in the face. He settles for the adjacent wall, and notes Jarok’s flinch with pleasure. 

“I wonder what Movek would have to say about your fondness for a prisoner,” Jarok says, rubbing his throat. 

“A disinclination to beat someone unconscious does not constitute fondness.” 

Jarok runs his tongue over his teeth. “Depends on who you ask.” 

Spock clenches his fists at his sides. He needs to leave this place immediately or risk drastic action from which he will not be able to recover. He gives Jarok a final contemptuous look and stalks from the room. His hands sting, and Spock realizes his fingernails have cut lurid green half-moons into the skin of his palms. 

An expectant hush hangs over the infirmary, like the night before some dreaded event. The large room is dim, full to approximately half-capacity. Healers and nurses move between the beds, and Spock quickly identifies N’Shira bent over one particular patient. As he draws closer, he can see a golden shock of hair against the white pillow, the face below it pale to match. There’s a livid bruise surrounding Jim’s eye; his hands, resting on the coverlet, are tightly bandaged. 

“Broken fingers,” says N’Shira. “We’re waiting for him to stabilize before we treat them.” 

“He will recover?” 

She nods. “In time.” She fixes Spock with a sharp look, and he fights the urge to shift from foot to foot. He is suddenly aware of the difference in their ages; she is perhaps ten years his senior.

“You were offsite when this occurred?” 

“Yes,” Spock says. “I would have…” He trails off, unable to complete the sentence. What would he have done to intercede on Jim’s behalf? He is unsure, but he cannot shake the certainty that he could have prevented this somehow. 

She touches him lightly on the shoulder, and Spock twitches. “You are not responsible,” she says. “Jarok has fixated on this boy, has he not? This is not the first or even the second time I’ve seen his handiwork. You are not responsible,” she says again, “but if you do not act now, you will bear responsibility for any future incidents.” 

“What can I do?” Spock says softly, as if to himself. 

“You must see that he’s transferred,” N’Shira says. “Move him to a different unit, away from Jarok.” 

She’s correct, of course. Move him, make him another’s problem. This is the only logical solution. Why, then, does Spock feel a twinge of regret? Jim has doubtless built some semblance of community for himself within the unit; Spock has never been incarcerated, but he has been isolated at a great distance from home, and he did not miss the shake in Sulu’s voice when he spoke of Jim. He sighs. He feels regret because the circumstances are regrettable. Logical. 

Unconscious as he is, Jim will remain unaware of Spock’s presence at his bedside, and he will certainly not derive comfort from that presence. Yet Spock dwells anyway, and wordlessly sinks into the chair N’Shira brings him with a nod of thanks. For all Spock’s rationalizing, he is unable to provide a logical explanation for his urge to remain, or for his indulgence of the impulse to reach for Jim’s flaccid hand and run a finger lightly over his wrist below the line of the bandage. Realizing what he’s doing, he snatches his hand away as if burned. He looks guiltily around for N’Shira, but she is nowhere to be seen.

***

Spock successfully negotiates Jim’s transfer with Commander Movek, pending his full recovery from the attack. He studiously avoids mention of the reason, save an allusion to a discipline issue he cannot resolve. Evidently, Movek reads between the lines, because he does not press Spock for further explanation. He arranges Jim’s transfer to Unit C, the mention of which gives Spock pause. C is Nalai’s unit; Spock has not heard from him since they parted ways at the hotel. Spock is unsure how to feel about this, though he is aware the correct response is to feel nothing, as the particulars of Jim’s transfer have nothing to do with him or his ill-advised personal entanglements. As he presents the necessary documents to Movek to sign, he cannot help but wonder if he will, after all, see Nalai again.

He does, as it turns out, though Spock would have been hard pressed to imagine the context ahead of time. 

He’s wrenched from sleep several nights later by the harsh shriek of the alarms indicating a security breach. He and Jarok share a look as they dress. Spock finishes first and leaves the room without a second glance, descending the stairs as quickly as he can while remaining upright. In the prison yard, he locates Sabok, his Gamma shift counterpart. The strobes are already flashing in the buildings, glancing off their faces in sickening pulses of thin light. 

“What has happened?” 

Sabok looks faintly ill. Whatever has gone wrong, it’s happened on his watch. “There’s a prisoner missing from the infirmary,” he says. “He was there at the first bed check, but Aekar got up to use the head and noticed that good-for-nothing Lhira left his post to smoke and by then he was gone.” 

“Who is it?” Spock asks, but even as Sabok opens his mouth to reply, Spock knows. 

“06911.” 

Spock’s first impulse is to curse, but he does not. “Understood,” he says. “Take your guard complement and canvas the perimeter. Find Jarok, have him do the same in the opposite direction and meet you in the middle.” 

“Where are you going?” 

“I have an idea.” 

Spock runs headlong for the infirmary, skidding to a stop outside and raking a hand through his hair before stepping into the building. He has the vague desire to collect himself before he confronts N’Shira. 

In something of an anticlimax, however, she is waiting for him just inside the door, leaning against a neatly made bed with a look of utter calm on her face. 

“Good night, Sublieutenant Spock,” she says. 

“Where is he?” Spock asks. 

She sighs and her shoulders slump, a soft release of tension that sounds for all the world like relief. 

“Gone.” 

Spock wants to step close to her, take hold of her shoulders and shake her. Instead, he clasps his hands behind his back and stands up straighter, as if he can take her tension into his muscles, as if that will accomplish anything against her resolve, against the half smile that plays across her lips. 

“Gone where?” he asks. He feels as if he’s reading a script. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “What kind of accomplice would I be otherwise?” 

“This is neither a joke nor a game,” Spock says. “In the name of the Empire, you will reveal 06911’s whereabouts to me on--” 

“On pain of death, correct? I think I know the punishment for treason.” Her eyes flick to the disruptor hastily belted to Spock’s waist. 

Spock does take a step closer then, letting his hands fall to his sides. “N’Shira--”

“I don’t know where he is.” She looks Spock hard in the eye. “He’d have been killed,” she says, voice barely louder than a whisper. “Even with the transfer, eventually, it would have happened and you know it.” 

“Why him?” She will give her life for him, Spock thinks. For a human prisoner she has met a handful of times. 

She smiles wide now, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Why not? You might have done it yourself.” 

Spock opens his mouth to refute her, unsure whether or not it will be a lie. Before he can speak, the door slides open to reveal Nalai, breathing heavily as if he too has run here. 

“He disappeared from here? The prisoner?” 

N’Shira steps forward, offering her hands. “You’ll want to restrain me,” she says. “Though I wouldn’t exactly call myself an escape risk, would you?” She looks askance at Spock, who finds himself pinned between this gaze and a similarly querulous look from Nalai. 

Spock presses his lips together. “Secure her,” he says. He wants badly to sit down. Once Nalai leads her from the infirmary, he leans against the wall beside the door and closes his eyes. Against the greenish-black of his closed lids he imagines Jim running. He is crouched low as if in a tunnel. He stumbles, pitching forward and reaching out to catch himself, relentless in his flight.

Dawn finds N’Shira in a holding cell and Spock and Nalai in Commander Movek’s office, a consequence of their technical dual responsibility for Jim. Movek appears to wish to be there almost as little as Spock does. When he addresses them, he pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as if he has a headache. 

“Allow me to go over this again, so that I can be certain of the sequence of events. You state that the healer N’Shira developed an attachment to this particular prisoner while he was under her care. As such, she orchestrated his escape from this facility and then freely confessed to her role in the crime?” 

“That is correct, sir,” Spock says. 

“And the prisoner has not been located?” 

“No, sir.” 

Movek sighs. “Most unfortunate. This facility has heretofore maintained a flawless security record. It is...upsetting, that this breach should come from one of our own.” 

“She is not a member of the Guard, sir,” Nalai says. “She is a civilian.” 

“Be that as it may. I will consult with Command; we may require increased stringency in our vetting processes prior to making civilian appointments.” He looks sidelong at Spock. “Or military assignments, for that matter.” 

Spock stiffens, then forces himself to relax. “Sir, if I may--”

Movek raises a hand to still him. “Save it, Sublieutenant. What’s done is done, is it not? Word of this will reach command whether or not I intercede.” 

Spock thinks of Jarok, of his easy coolness in the face of Spock’s loss of control. He clenches his teeth. “Understood, sir.” 

“Very well. You’re both dismissed. Keep the search up for the rest of the day, but I don’t want you wasting resources unduly. I don’t like his chances of getting off-planet, and if the border guard shoots him that’s one less thing we’ve got to deal with.” He eases back into his desk chair, poised to call up the homescreen on his PADD. His index finger freezes, hovering. 

“Oh,” he says. “And you’re aware of the penalties for treason, of course. See that the healer’s sentence is carried out. Personally, if you please. I’m not especially confident in either of you at the moment, but my confidence in your underlings is even lower.” 

Spock doesn’t look at Nalai until they’ve left the building entirely. When he does, it’s to watch him sink to his knees in the red dirt. He finds a loose rock, picks it up and worries it between his fingers. 

“Damn,” Nalai says, then falls silent. He tosses the rock a short distance and it lands in the soil with a faint, dusty splat. 

Spock stands apart for a time, watching Nalai stare at the ground. Then he steps closer, kneeling beside him on the ground. “Are you well?” he asks. 

“Are you joking? Spock, we’ve just been ordered to...to _kill_ her.” 

“I am aware,” Spock says. “It is unfortunate.” 

Nalai shakes his head. “Unfortunate,” he says as if to himself. 

Spock reaches out and places a tentative hand on Nalai’s shoulder. “Come,” he says. 

“What, now?” 

“Waiting will not change our orders, or the outcome,” Spock says. A creeping sense of calm has come over him, and he notes it with detached curiosity. He looks at his hand, resting on the grey of Nalai’s uniform, and he feels as if it belongs to someone else. 

“Come, Nalai.” He stands, and Nalai follows suit. 

The morning light is thin, and shadows still cling to the edges of the buildings. This is not a job for the morning, Spock thinks, though logically the nature of the act will not change by virtue of the time at which it is performed. He allows himself a minute sigh, and begins to walk. Behind him, Nalai curses, but as Spock continues on he hears the scuffle of Nalai’s steps as he follows. N’Shira is held in a cellblock relatively close to the outermost gate, and their walk there takes six minutes and forty-three seconds. There’s a guard standing outside the squat brown building smoking, and he nods at Spock in a greeting Spock does not return.

He turns to face Nalai. “Is your disruptor fully charged?” 

“Yes, but--”

“Give it to me.” 

A partially-charged disruptor, as Spock knows his to be, cannot deliver a single killing shot. Spock does not wish to do this more than once. Nalai freezes with his hand on his holster, and Spock gestures for him to hurry. “Please,” he says. Nalai blinks at him like one half-asleep, but complies. 

Spock hefts the disruptor, turning it over in his hand, careful to keep the barrel directed at the ground. Other than performing routine maintenance to his own weapon, he has not handled one since the incident in the mess several months previous during which he was forced to disable three would-be assailants. He recalls a similar sensation of preternatural calm then. 

“Are you prepared?” he says to Nalai. 

He shoves his hands into his pockets, eyes trained on the ground, the smoking guard, the roof of the building--anywhere but Spock’s face. “I...I do not think I can.” 

Spock wants to go to him, wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him. _Do you believe that I am eager to do this? Do not make me do it alone!_

But the idea of begging Nalai to assist him in killing a woman is so ludicrous that Spock cannot form the words, cannot touch Nalai for fear that his emotions might spring forth through their contact as if of their own volition. He merely shifts the disruptor to his opposite hand, shifts his weight to the opposite foot, and turns away. 

“Very well,” he says over his shoulder. 

Nalai doesn’t respond until Spock has approached the building and stands on the threshold of the open door. “I’m sorry,” he calls. Spock does not look back. 

The cellblock is cool and silent; at present N’Shira is its only occupant. Spock shares a glance with the guard, who has stubbed out his cigarette and followed him inside. N’Shira sits on a neatly made cot; her hands lie folded in her lap loosely and the set of her shoulders betrays no hint of tension. When Spock moves into her field of vision, she looks up at him and smiles. Spock’s gut churns. 

“Leave us,” Spock says to the guard.

“Good morning,” says N’Shira when the guard is gone. 

Spock swallows. “Good morning.” 

“You look like you’re going to be sick,” she says, as casually as if Spock were a patient at the infirmary. 

“I am going to unlock the door,” Spock says, fingering the keypad. “Please stand against the far wall.” 

She does as he says, crossing her arms over her chest and watching him with a tinge of what looks like amusement. “As I said last night, I don’t think I’m much of a flight risk.” 

“I am following procedure,” Spock says weakly. He takes a pair of cuffs from the hook on the wall, enters his personnel code to open them. “If you will turn and face the wall,” he says. 

“Come, Sublieutenant,” she says, cocking her head to the side like a bird. “Must we stand on such formality? You’d think you were here to execute a complete stranger.” 

Her words irritate him; Spock wishes she would thrash or cry out, wishes she would let slip some hint of the distress that clutches at the edge of his controls. He thinks he could restrain her, by force if necessary, thinks that under his hands her struggling body would be reduced to a set of stimuli to trip the hair-trigger of his training and allow him to divorce his actions from reality altogether. That he wishes for this makes him feel truly ill. He secures her hands with the cuffs, his fingers fumbling at her wrists as he tries to avoid coming into contact with her skin. She’s so close to him that he can smell her; her hair has been scraped into a pile atop her head, and the feathery strands that have worked themselves loose stir blithely in the recirculated air. He imagines her as a girl. 

“Have you been this close to a woman before? It’s very intimate, don’t you think?” 

“Please be silent,” Spock says, trying desperately to keep his voice from shaking. 

“Are you going to take me out to the yard, where the prisoners can watch? They’ll like it; half of them will think of it tonight while they touch themselves.” 

“Please,” Spock says again. 

“Do it here,” she says. “There’s a drain in the floor, look. Very tidy.” 

“N’shira--”

“Shut up. Don’t say my name. Don’t pretend that--” 

“Tell me, then,” Spock says. “Tell me why.” 

“I told you before. Why not him? He’s not the first one I’ve wanted to--well. I’ll just say that I’ve seen things here, Sublieutenant. We are an honorable people, are we not? We live and die for honor. I have begun to think that that honor should extend to more than just _Rihannsu_. I go into the city. I see the memorial to our war dead. How many, a hundred? Two? For how many _Vulkansu_?” 

Spock cannot suppress a gasp. N’Shira spins to face him, and they are so close now, close enough to kiss the human way. 

“That’s treason,” she says, mimicking what she must perceive to be shock on his part. “Well, Sublieutenant, as I am already condemned to death on charges of treason, you should not sound so surprised.” 

He thinks of speaking then, of making some confession. But she is no priestess, here to unburden him. It would be unseemly, to ask it of her at the last. 

Her eyes dart to his disruptor. “Is it charged?” 

He nods. “Of course.” 

She nods back, once, lifts her chin and looks him in the eye. “Stop stalling, then,” she mutters, and Spock is unsure which of them she is addressing. 

“ _Bed aoi_ , Spock,” she says. He draws his weapon, nestles the barrel in the hair at her temple with revolting tenderness. Her eyes are closed when he fires. 

And just like that, his orders are carried out. He cannot see; he is unsure how he exits the building, only that he staggers forth from it and falls to his knees on the red sand. Black spots swarm his field of vision, and he remains prostrate until they clear. When he looks up at last, he is alone. The guard has gone back inside, and Nalai is nowhere to be seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hevam--human/Terran (derogatory)
> 
> Bed aoi--Goodbye forever


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _C’mon, Jim, you didn’t get all the way up here to get caught at the border, did you?_

The woman in the glass booth is watching Jim. “Can I help you?” she asks, furrowed brows visible even beneath the short curtain of her bangs. 

The shuttleport is close to empty. There are a few lonely travelers milling around, late for the last transport or early for the next. They sit and doze on benches. It’s just them and Jim and the woman in the booth. She has a holoscreen tuned to the news. 

He’s dropped his credit chip at the ticket kiosk, and it has worked its way under the machine. “Dammit,” he mutters, cursing his shaky hands as he kneels in front of it and peers into the dirty dark underneath. 

“I’m fine,” he calls over his shoulder. “Just gotta--”

He holds his breath and tries not to breathe in too much dust--the last thing Jim needs is to have a fucking asthma attack in the middle of his daring escape--and slides his arm under the machine, palming years’ worth of stratified grit and rodent shit and who knows what else. His fingers graze the edge of what he hopes is his chip and he grins in spite of himself. 

“Gotcha.”

He pulls it out and blows on it to clear the dust away. God, he’d be so fucked without this thing. He’s probably about 85% fucked already. He gets to his feet, yanking his hat down further on his head reflexively and feeding the credit chip into the slot in the kiosk successfully this time. The touchscreen lights up with his options. They’re pretty limited this far out, and Jim doesn’t exactly have time to deliberate. He stabs his finger at an orange rectangle: _Starbase 16. Connections to ch’Rihan, Kronosh, Terrha._ Well, he’s sure as hell not going to Romulus or Kronos. 

“Earth it is, then,” he mutters. The ticket maxes out his credit--N’Shira’s credit, really. Maybe it’s better this way; if they trace him to the starbase, that’ll be as far as they get. As for Jim, he’ll figure something out once he gets there. 

“Tell them I stole it,” Jim had told her. 

As soon as he said it, he realized how stupid it sounded. She’d woken him when the guard left, the idiot with the three pack a day habit. Lucky, really, that tonight he’d run out and risked the walk to the guardhouse to bum a smoke. Jim didn’t know much about N’Shira, but he knew she wasn’t one to let an opportunity like that just pass by. She handed him the credit chip as he shrugged into someone’s cast off shirt, already wearing a pair of jeans just a shade too large. He didn’t want to know where they’d come from. 

“Seriously,” Jim said. She hadn’t been paying attention, he didn’t think, but when he raised his voice to get her to look, to get her to _listen_ , she just raised a finger to her lips. 

“Shh.” 

They’d run the plan over and over, alone in an exam room when she was supposed to be dermally regenerating him or whatever. 

“I’m going to take you through to the laundry. Halfway down the chute is a grate--we used to snag linens on it all the time; T’Hera crawled in with a torch once to see what it was. It’s big; you should fit inside, but it will be difficult.”

“I’m flexible.” 

“Hopefully.”

Jim picked idly at a hangnail. “So, it’s a grate. Does it...go anywhere?” 

“Unfortunately, I cannot answer you. Its orientation corresponds with the direction of the eastern fenceline. If you follow the tunnel far enough--”

“It might spit me out outside.” 

“That would be the best-case scenario, yes.” 

Jim sighed. “Well, I guess worst-case scenario is I come crawling back here, literally. And hope no one’s missed me yet.” 

“I am sorry I cannot offer you a more appealing plan.” 

“Not your fault.” 

He got lucky, is all Jim can think. He got so fucking lucky. Because after he shimmied down the chute and into the grate, after he dragged himself along a shoddily constructed duct praying to any power who might be listening that this wasn’t some kind of water line, he finally came to an intersection. The tunnel continued on, just as dark and indecipherable as it had been, but there was another path now, too, one that sloped upwards gently and invitingly. Jim took a deep breath and went up. 

He emerged from the earth and hugged the ground, lifting his head like a cautious animal. He was outside the fence. He strained to listen, but the alarm wasn’t sounding, not yet. He could see the black spike of a guard tower, but if it was occupied and they weren’t too busy playing cards or jacking each other off they’d be focused on any activity inside. So he hedged his bets and lit out for the road. Halfway to town there was a guy in a vee who pulled over for him, and Jim was ready to bolt into the desert but the guy didn’t seem up for asking questions. Jim was pretty sure he was drunk, actually, so he counted himself lucky a second time over for getting to the shuttleport in one piece.

He hits print, bypassing the option to have a digital version sent to his comm, seeing as he doesn’t own one. The woman in the booth is bent over a PADD, ignoring the news ticker on the holoscreen overhead. 

_Good_ , he thinks. 

He’s not going to wait around to see the all-points bulletin scroll by announcing his escape. He thinks about N’Shira. Surely they’ve done bedcheck already, which means they’ll know he’s gone. He wishes he had a chrono. He wonders who she’s talking to, who’s questioning her. Anyone but Jarok, and shit, Jim should’ve thought of that, shouldn’t he? He tries to push the thought from his head, guilt settling cold in his belly. Jim pockets the flimsy ticket and scans the place for security once more before going through the turnstile and out onto the platform in search of his dock. 

_Platform VI, express to Starbase 16, departing 0500 hours._

Just about an hour to kill. 

He finds a bench a ways down the platform and sits, wrapping his arms around his knees. It’s chilly, and he’s underdressed for it, but there’s nothing he can do about that now. As he sits, he lets his eyes droop closed and his mind drift. Weirdly, his thoughts turn to Sublieutenant Spock. By rights, Jim probably shouldn’t feel anything about him. Anger, maybe, the way most of the other prisoners seemed to rage against him just by virtue of his being there. But he’d always been...if not exactly _nice_ to Jim, then fair, at least. Jim gets the impression Spock isn’t nice to anyone, that maybe fair is the best you can hope for. There is something, though, something that snags at the corner of his consciousness. Spock at his bedside, looming and a little gawky, all at once. N’Shira said he’d come to see Jim after Jarok beat the crap out of him, but Jim was practically comatose, so naturally he doesn’t remember. All Jim feels when he thinks of Spock is strange. Strange and guilty, like he should’ve said goodbye. 

He sits there ruminating and trying to stay as inconspicuous as possible until he hears the announcement for his shuttle over the comm system. When he finally does, he slips inside and makes for the back, picking a window seat in one of the last rows. He rests his head against the window, feeling cold and sore. He was supposed to have been checked out of the infirmary in a couple days, but he still feels kind of beat up. He figures it’s fitting, considering. He shoves a sleeve up his arm to trace the ring of finger-width bruises, yellowing and fading now but still tender over the bone. Jarok, he won’t miss. Sulu, he will, questionable sanity aside. He’d had no way of warning him, but one evening a couple days beforehand Sulu ducked into the infirmary, presumably when a guard’s back was turned. Despite the fact that he couldn’t possibly have he seemed somehow to know. 

_“Hey, do me a favor, will you?”_

_“What?”_

_“Look me up once I’m out? It’ll be a couple years, but--”_

_“Sulu, what are you talking about?”_

_“Just do it, okay?” He looked at Jim with narrowed eyes, assessing. “I’ve got a hunch about you, is all.”_

_Jim tried to laugh, but it caught wrong in his throat and turned into a cough that hurt his ribs. “Whatever you say, man.”_

A hunch. The transport is airborne, Vulcan mercifully dwindling in the pre-dawn below, and the  
only hunch Jim has right now says this has all been way too easy so far. 

He’s roused from another uneasy half-doze by the crackle of the comm system, a smooth, Romulan-inflected female voice making an announcement to the half full cabin. 

_We are now approaching the edge of Vulcan space. Transport SX 7515B preparing for docking with border patrol vessel. Repeat, preparing to dock with border patrol vessel. All passengers should have identifying documents out and ready for inspection. Docking sequence will be complete within five minutes. Please remain seated while inspectors pass through the cabin._

Fuck. 

He sits up, realizing as he does so that it’s probably in his best interests not to look too much like the announcement just completely freaked him out. He fiddles with the knitted brim of his hat and tries to scan the cabin as subtly as possible. He looks up--there are overhead luggage bins, but he seriously doubts he could get up there without someone seeing. There’s a muffled rumble, and the shuttle jolts gently to one side. 

_C’mon, Jim, you didn’t get all the way up here to get caught at the border, did you? ___

__He looks around the cabin one more time, panic rising despite the big breaths of air he’s sucking down in an effort to keep calm. He winces. It’s a long shot, he thinks, such a long shot that this’ll work, but he’s up, and he gets the fresher door closed just as the shuttle airlock slides open with a hiss. He engages the lock and slumps against the inside of the door._ _

___Now what,_ he thinks. He can’t exactly camp out in here until they get to the starbase, plus there’s no guarantee one of the attendants isn’t going to remember that there’s a squirrelly-looking human kid who’s spending way too much time in the head, and if that happens and they decide to stick around til they can clear him--well. That can’t happen._ _

__The walls are smooth and grey, and it’s like a fucking sardine can in here; narrow as hell with a relatively high ceiling, since Romulans run tall. He looks up at a seam that runs up the wall to a corner where it meets the bulkhead. Outside, he thinks he can make out the low murmur of voices. And then there it is, up there in the corner- the slightest crack, a skinny wedge of black that could be some weird discoloration or could be--_ _

__Jim’s up on the head before he knows what he’s doing, jamming one foot against the wall and putting as much weight on it as he can. His fingers just barely brush the ceiling, so he shifts his weight back onto the head and pushes off, the momentum giving him the lift he needs to shove the fingertips of one hand into what’s now unmistakable as the place where two ceiling tiles have come apart, hinting at a space beyond. After launching himself at the ceiling a couple times, he’s able to slide the flat of his hand and then his arm up to the elbow into the crevice, and once he’s there he leans into his arm to test whether the intact ceiling can hold his weight. Eventually, there’s nothing for it but to trust to his relative lightness, and with no small amount of pain and the scream of abused muscles Jim hauls himself into the crawlspace above the fresher. He blinks futilely into the pitch black, unable to tell how large the space actually is and unwilling to move too much for fear the ceiling won’t hold. He’s not crazy about the idea of passing the whole shuttle trip up here in the dark, but he doesn’t have a choice, so he scoots back as much as he dares and pulls the ceiling tile back into place._ _

__It’s freezing up here in the bulkhead, that much closer to the outer hull and evidently beyond the reach of the cabin climate controls. Jim tugs his sleeves as far down over his hands as he can, pillows his head on his folded arms and curls in on himself._ _

__The trip passes slowly. He tries to sleep, but he’s so cold he keeps waking himself up shivering, worried he’s going to flail around and either go through the ceiling or attract the attention of someone in the fresher. There’s a hubbub when they realize the lock is jammed, and one of the crew must override it eventually, because after awhile people start to come and go. Finally, finally he hears the now-muffled comm system announce docking at the starbase. He waits as long as he can stomach, slipping down out of the ceiling and locking the door before taking the longest and most satisfying piss he’s ever taken. Then he slides the door open just a fraction. There’s a lone worker in the cabin, his back to Jim. He’s cleaning._ _

__Jim takes a deep breath and marches out of the fresher like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The cleaner turns around and stares at him as Jim hold up his hands in the universal gesture for “can I scootch by here?” and slides past him in the narrow aisle, giving him an easy grin as he goes. He makes it out of the shuttle without a word and hauls ass down the platform, wheeling around the corner to back up against the wall and wipe his sweaty palms on his pants._ _

__It’s only then, the adrenaline high fading, that he realizes how shitty he feels. He’s been awake way too long, and evidently huddling in a freezing bulkhead doesn’t exactly agree with him because his body aches all over, particularly his head. _Doesn’t it just figure_ , he thinks. Scrawny as everyone seemed to think he was, he’d never been sick a day on Vulcan, but hell if he doesn’t feel like he’s got the flu or something now. _ _

__He should get out of the station, find some place to really sleep. He hasn’t been on a starbase in a long time, not since the trip out to Tarsus. He hadn’t liked it then and he doesn’t like it now. He feels ungrounded here; competing senses of both vastness and claustrophobia settle on him immediately. When Jim’s shuttle left Vulcan, the suns had yet to rise in the morning, but here on the starbase it seems to be evening. The time skip isn’t helping Jim’s sense of disorientation. Outside the station, he steps onto a wide pedestrian thoroughfare studded with holotrees strung with lights. Overhead, the clear plasteel lets in starlight, or maybe that’s a holoscreen too because Jim can see a fat, full moon that shouldn’t be there. He ducks his head and looks at his feet as he walks, the simulated night sky somehow nauseating. The street is lined with shops and restaurants, cozy-looking little places with their windows thrown open to the fake night air. Jim can hear voices and gales of laughter at a remove, like he’s underwater; he feels rather than sees the people walking past as they veer into his personal space and his whole body throbs as if the way they displace the air around him is too much, too unbearable. The headache pounds at his temples, and he wants to close his eyes._ _

__Eventually, he makes his way to what looks like a little park, the cheery street merging into it and merging back out on the other side. The greenspace is filled with the same holotrees that line the street, the same tiny lights with their maddening twinkle. There’s a softish-looking grassy knoll off to the left, and Jim flops down on it gratefully only to jump back up again: the grass is simmed too, obviously, and sitting on it feels like lounging on a bed of live wire. He shakes off the last of the staticky buzz and opts for a bench instead, and he avoids the odd looks he gets from passersby as he props a hand under his cheek and doesn’t even try to stop himself from dozing off._ _

__“Hey,” says a voice. “Hey, you, boy.”_ _

__A prod at his arm; he feels his sleepy, dead-weight body shift._ _

___No,_ he thinks. _I don’t want to._ Five more minutes. He’s dreaming, not of Tarsus or of prison but of his bed back home on the farm, clean white sheets and that yellow quilt, his pillow damp with drool. He always did sleep open-mouthed. Like a fish, Winona said. _ _

__“Come on, wake up,” the voice says again. It’s soft. Jim likes it. It can just keep talking to him while he lies here in bed. He thinks he can hear the trees blowing in the wind outside his window, and it must be like May or June because the trees are all leafed out, they must be to make a sound like that in the breeze--_ _

__“Ow!” Jim sits up, rubbing at his arm. Standing next to his bench is a girl who doesn’t look all that older than he is. She’s wearing a comically oversized coat, watching him with wide eyes from beneath a mess of red curls. She looks a little freaked out, which she should, because she just fucking pinched him awake. Also, she’s green._ _

__“What the fuck?” Jim says. Mostly about the pinch; he’s seen Orions before, but he’s never actually talked to one._ _

__“Sorry, okay? You wouldn’t wake up. I thought you were nodding or something.”_ _

__“Nodding?”_ _

__She rolls her eyes. “Fucked up.”_ _

__Jim shakes his head. “I…no, I was just sleeping.”_ _

__“Well, you can’t sleep here.”_ _

__He sits up straighter, rubbing his eyes. His head is still pounding; he wonders how long he was asleep. “Why not? It’s a public park, isn’t it?”_ _

__“Sure, but most people don’t just pass out on a park bench in the middle of town.” She crosses her arms over her chest and gives him a measuring look. “Where are you from, anyway?”_ _

__He shrugs. “Around.”_ _

__She snorts. “Yeah, okay. You got any ID on you? Because when you get stopped by the Guard for loitering they’re going to ask for it.”_ _

__Jim can’t stop the way his hand twitches reflexively toward the opposite arm, the lumpy scar over his ID chip that never quite healed right. The girl sees it too, because she bites her lip hard and her green face goes a shade mintier._ _

__“Shit, are you serious?” She reaches for his sleeve, and Jim flashes back to that first day in the mess hall, Spock’s spidery fingers hovering over the same place. The girl doesn’t hesitate, though, just jams his sleeve back up his arm. She whistles through her teeth when she sees the scar, faded but still a pissed-off looking deep pink. She spits a word in a language Jim doesn’t know, though it’s not much of a stretch to guess it’s a curse._ _

__“Goddammit, Gaila,” she mutters to herself. Then she heaves a put-upon sigh and closes her hand around his wrist, tugging. “You sure as hell can’t stay here now. Get up and come with me.”_ _

__Jim scrambles to his feet. When the girl--Gaila--seems satisfied that he’s upright, she turns around and walks off quickly, hands shoved in her coat pockets. He follows at a jog. Each step feels like it’s jostling the blood in his head or something. He draws up alongside her and she gives him a darting sidelong glance._ _

__“Where are we going?”_ _

__She rolls her eyes at him, but she’s grinning. Jim kind of likes her already._ _

__“Home,” she says._ _

____

***

Gaila’s home turns out to be one of the seedier capsule hotels off the main drag. They breeze in through the lobby and she waves to the desk clerk, a sleepy-looking Andorian. “Hey, Jerry,” Gaila calls.

“Jerry?” 

“I don’t think that’s his real name.” 

“Is Gaila your real name?” 

She smiles at him. Looking back, Jim probably falls in love with her a little bit right then and there. 

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” She punches the button for the turbolift, which is so shaky  
Jim wants to just take the stairs. 

“It’s fine,” Gaila says, waving a hand dismissively. “Just give it a second to warm up. And hey, what’s your name?”

“Jim.” 

“Jim,” she says, turning the word over strangely on her tongue like she’s tasting it. “Hmm.” 

Jim’s not sure he believes her about the lift, but the car shudders to life at last and tows them up slowly. Gaila lives on the top floor. “The penthouse,” she says wryly, but it’s more like an attic, half filled with old, broken furniture she’s draped with sheets in an effort to make it look less old and broken. But there’s a window, and below it a mattress on the floor made up like a proper bed. She’s hung the walls with more of the same lights he saw outside, multicolored this time, and when she turns them on the whole room is suffused with a pinky-gold glow that cheers Jim instantly. 

“You look like shit,” Gaila says matter-of-factly. “You hungry?” 

Jim nods mutely, and she turns to an overlarge, early-model replicator shoved into a corner. “This thing doesn’t exactly have an extensive repertoire,” she says, fiddling with the settings. “How do you feel about toast?” 

Jim eats the toast with relish, which Gaila watches with amusement. Afterwards, she takes the plate and sets it over by the door to take down to wash. 

“What’re we doing now?” Jim asks. 

“You’re sleeping,” Gaila says, shrugging into her coat again. “And I’ve got to go back out.” 

Jim doesn’t need to be asked twice, kicking off his boots and crawling onto the bed to lie back against the pillows. He thinks vaguely that he’s probably getting Gaila’s bed all gross, but she doesn’t seem to mind. 

“Fresher’s one floor down,” she says as if she knows what he’s thinking. “I have to share with the guests, but that floor’s empty right now.” 

“Do you have to pay to stay here? I mean, it’s a hotel and everything.” There’s an unpleasant clutching sensation in his chest at the thought; if he needs to pay her--

She waves a hand. “We can talk about that when I get back,” she says. “There are some things you--well, never mind. Like I said, we can talk about it later. Just get some rest for now, okay?” She turns to go, and as she does Jim thinks he sees a flash of something cross her face, a tightness at the eyes like she’s tired or sad. But then she’s out the door, and Jim is way too tired to dwell on it long afterwards. The sheets are old and worn, but clean, and as he buries his face in the pillow and lets the soft weight of the comforter lull him he wonders if he can dream his way back to Iowa. 

He is vaguely aware of Gaila returning in the grey dawn, or what passes for dawn on a starbase with artificially imposed daylight hours. The mattress shifts next to him, and there’s an influx of colder air for a second as Gaila crawls under the covers and rearranges them over them both. Then there’s a mass of fragrant hair on the pillow next to Jim’s, and he rolls over and goes back to sleep with a hazy sense of comfort he can’t quite explain. 

They sleep most of the day, which is fine with Jim, since this is the most comfortable bed he’s been in since Tarsus. He wakes up periodically, twice venturing down to the fresher despite his wariness about running into someone else. He doesn’t, though, and when he comes back up and crawls under the covers again Gaila just stirs and mutters in her sleep. Once, Jim wakes up curled into her back, a leg draped over hers like the big spoon. _She’s so warm_ , he thinks before he fully realizes what he’s doing and scoots dutifully away, leaving at least a handspan between them. 

The next time he wakes up, she’s sitting on the windowsill above the bed, looking out into the street, hands wrapped around a steaming mug. 

“Is it hot on Orion?” 

She starts. 

“Sorry,” Jim says. “Didn’t mean to--”

She smiles. “No, it’s fine. I just...I’m not used to having anyone else around. It’s kind of nice, actually. And yeah, it is. Hot on Orion. I don’t know why they keep it so freaking cold here all the time; they can control the temperature.” 

Jim wraps his arms around his crossed legs, rests his chin on his knee. “My mom says it’s space. So damn cold; it takes a lot of power to keep it totally climate controlled, so they usually keep it as cool as they can to keep costs down.” 

“The pointy-ears must hate it,” Gaila says, wrinkling her nose. 

“Good,” Jim says, and Gaila laughs.

“You want some tea?” She gestures at the replicator. 

“I can figure it out.” He pads across the room, bending over to inspect the settings. “You know, this old a model, there might be some stuff I can tweak. Anything in particular you might want?” 

Her eyes go dinner-plate wide. “You’re kidding. There’s this Orion dish--the Romulans have something close but it’s just not the same. I would _die_ if I could eat it again, Jim. Die.” 

He laughs. “Write down the ingredients and I’ll see what I can do.” 

“Your mother,” Gaila says, a little hesitantly, like she’s asked this question before and had it go south. “Is she--”

“I don’t know,” Jim says, that’s the only answer he’s got, whether Gaila’d been about to ask if she was dead or if she was back on Earth or whatever. “She was working on a Romulan base last I knew. She’s an engineer.”

“I always thought that sounded fun,” Gaila says, tracing an invisible line on the window with her index finger. “Wrenching, making things work. Sounds satisfying. And also kind of...manageable, somehow.” 

Jim nods. “Most of the time, you can fix machines,” he says. “I think that’s what she likes about it. My dad died,” he supplies, and it’s maybe a little weird that he’s opening up like this, but a decent night’s sleep isn’t the only thing Jim’s wanted for over the last however many months. There hadn’t been a whole lot of time to chat on Vulcan. “He died when I was little, like really little, and I think...it kind of messed her up, you know?” 

Gaila shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s different for Orions,” she says. “At least, I think it is. I have a mother, but it’s...it’s different.” She doesn’t elaborate, and Jim turns back to the replicator. 

Jim makes his tea, and they sit like that for a little while longer, mostly quiet, sometimes one or the other of them offering up some quip or comment: the unfortunate salmon color of Gaila’s lumpy couch, Jim’s holey socks. Finally, Gaila gets down from her perch at the windowsill and sits cross-legged opposite Jim on the mattress. She plucks at his sleeve. 

“Let me see.” 

He hesitates for a second, and there’s that memory of Spock again, long fingers hovering just so. But then he folds his sleeve back and shows her, lets her run her fingers over his scar. 

“Does it hurt? It looks like it hurts.” 

“Sometimes. It didn’t heal right; they said I might’ve been allergic to something in the chip.” 

Gaila makes a face. “It’s got to go,” she says. 

“Wait, _go_? What are you talking about?” 

She holds up her own arm, makes a slicing motion across it. “You have to. You get picked up by the Guard, it’s the first thing they’re going to look for. Dead giveaway. There’s no arguing with one of these.” 

“Look, Gaila, it’s not what you think--”

“I don’t care what you did, all right? But I’m not letting some...some ex-con on the lam hole up with me.” 

“Ex-con?” 

“Whatever. Finish your drink and I’ll give you something stiffer for the pain, if you want. It’s not even that bad, anyway, just kind of bloody.” 

“How would you know?” 

She rolls her eyes and pushes up her own sleeve, flipping her arm over to show him the dark green knot of scar tissue. “Did it to myself. Like I said before, I don’t care what you did. I just care that you’re not a liability, if you’re going to stay here.”

“I can stay?” he grins in spite of himself, and Gaila tries to be a hardass for about ten seconds before she’s grinning back. 

“Whatever,” she says. “Might be nice to have some company for a change.” 

“You know how I can make some cash?” 

She smiles again, conspiratorially. “First things first. Give me that.” 

She grabs his mug, downs the last of the tea herself and ferrets around in what looks like a pile of clothes next to the bed until she produces a large half-full bottle of amber liquid.

“Just in case someone comes up here to poke around,” she says to Jim’s odd look. 

She opens the bottle and sloshes some into Jim’s mug. It’s noxious; he can smell it as soon as she pours. “What the hell is that?” 

“Andorian moonshine. ‘Puts hair on your chest,’ that’s what Jerry always says. Which is just weird, because he doesn’t even have hair on his chest.” 

Jim decides not to ask how she knows that little detail. He takes the mug when she offers it and takes a sip, descending almost immediately into a maelstrom of coughing. Predictably, Gaila thinks it’s hilarious. 

“Shut up,” he says, swallowing. 

“Bring it with you,” she says, digging in her bag for something. “We need to go down to the fresher.” 

The something turns out to be a freaking laser scalpel. “Where the hell did you get that?” Jim asks in horror, clutching his arm. They’re in the fresher, and Jim is noticing all kinds of possible sources of sepsis and death he hadn’t on his earlier trips. 

“I run into all kinds of interesting things,” she says, holding it up to the light. Something in her smile reminds Jim of Sulu, which is decidedly not a good thing. 

“Pass me that bottle.” She grabs it by the neck and tilts it, pouring some of the liquid over Jim’s arm. 

“Are you kidding me? Is this field surgery or some shit?” 

“Quit whining and take another drink. If you flinch there’s no telling what I could cut off.” 

It’s frankly pretty ridiculous; she’s cutting out an implant a few millimeters thick, not amputating his arm. But there’s something a little warm and theatrical about the way they’re hunched together in the tiny room, Gaila grinning like a pirate and Jim playing a lamb for the slaughter. The cut stings, but the worst part is the smell of the cautery, which Jim mostly drowns out by planting his nose in his mug. 

“I don’t have a regenerator,” Gaila says when it’s all over. “We’re going to have to stitch it up.” 

“I think you just get off on torturing me.” It’s cool, though; the drink is getting to him, and Jim is starting to think he’s not going to feel much of anything. Gaila bites off a length of thread and Jim proffers his arm. 

When they’re done, Jim rocks back on his heels, a little queasy in spite of himself. Gaila fastens a bandage and pats it gently, like she’s asking it nicely to stay put. She wipes off the implant, turns it over in her hand. “We should get rid of this,” she says. “What if they can track you somehow?” 

“You don’t think they’d have done it already if they could?” He holds out his hand for it. 

“What, you’re just dying for a souvenir of your time on...where were you, anyway?” 

Jim sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Vulcan.” 

Gaila whistles. “I heard that place is a shithole,” she says. 

Jim shrugs, feeling a misplaced prick of defensiveness. Vulcan. It wasn’t the planet’s fault the Romulans could hold a grudge for thousands of years, and since Jim had never actually met one of her people he felt like he should withhold judgement. “I don’t know, it was what it was. I got through.” 

“You got out,” she says, like she’s correcting him. She stares at him for a long moment, then shakes her head and sets about tidying up her surgical implements. 

“So what about you?” Jim asks. “Where’d you get yours?” 

She doesn’t look up. “Pleasure planet,” she says, like he’s just asked her birthday, or her favorite color. 

Jim sucks in a breath. “Gaila--”

She gets up, slinging her bag over her shoulder and shoving her hands under the sonic sink. “All done,” she says. “Let’s go back upstairs. You’re like three drinks ahead of me.” 

“It’s 3:30 in the afternoon.”

***

“Can I ask you a question?” Jim asks blearily.

It’s an indeterminate amount of time later. Jim would know how long, probably, if he wasn’t at least a couple more drinks in. Stupid, wonderful Gaila and her stupid, wonderful Andorian moonshine. Stupid, wonderful Andorians. Jim’s going to introduce himself to Jerry post fucking haste and thank him in person because he is so incredibly drunk and it’s great. They’re sprawled out on Gaila’s bed, watching afternoon wane into evening. 

Gaila elbows him. 

“Ow, what the hell?” 

“You were going to ask me a question.” 

“Oh, right. Um. Are you a prostitute?” 

Gaila sits up. Jim’s kind of draped over her, so when she does he flops back onto the bed unceremoniously. 

“Hey!” 

Gaila rakes her hair out of her eyes, which is either a reflex or a way of being sure Jim can see just how pissed off she is. He sits up too, holding his hands out to her like he’s warding her off or making a peace offering. He’s not quite sure which, to be honest. 

“Fuck you,” Gaila says, spitting out a mouthful of her drink alongside the bed. 

“Gross, Gaila, what was that for?” 

“Bitter thoughts swallowed are bitter in the belly,” she says, like that explains anything. “And seriously, fuck you. What, because I’m Orion? You think I wheeled and dealed and fought my way off fucking Wrigley’s--gods, that hellhole--just to turn around and trick for pointy-ears here in their own backyard? You’ve got another fucking think coming, dude.” 

“Whoa, chill. I’m sorry, okay? I just thought...you live in a hotel, right, and you work nights, you said so yourself. I assumed, obviously incorrectly.” 

Her hand is next to him on the mattress, palm down, and on impulse he covers it with his own. He figures he’s as likely as not to get decked for his trouble, but it feels important somehow, like she might just take off to wait for night time, for whatever it is she does, somewhere far away from him. Right now, that seems like the worst possible outcome to Jim. Gaila’s hand twitches beneath his like she’s thinking of pulling back, but then she relaxes. They sit like that for a long time. Jim watches the shadows lengthen across the far wall. 

“My arm hurts,” he says finally. 

She snorts. “Good.” There’s no venom in it, though, and after a second she extracts her hand and taps at his forearm. “Turn over.” 

She runs gentle fingers over his bandage. “I don’t want to mess with it. We’ll check tomorrow. But it should be fine.” 

“How long did yours take to heal?” 

“A week, maybe? Ten days? I don’t remember.” 

He nods. “So,” he says. 

“So?” She sounds chagrined, like she knows what he’s going to ask. 

“So what do you do? If you don’t do, y’know, that?” 

She rolls her eyes theatrically at him. “If you must know,” she says, “I’m a thief.” 

He nods appreciatively. “I like it. Like the tarot card.” 

“What?” 

“Nothing. Just something we used to mess around with sometimes back home. Well, not really me, more like the girls in my class. Anyway, it’s dumb. Like a predict your future kind of thing.” 

“We have seers,” she says, picking at the edge of the bedsheet. “Back home. They read signs, they burn things and read the smoke, the ash. Is it like that?” 

“I don’t think so.” Jim has a hard time believing anything accomplished in a middle school girl’s bedroom in Riverside, Iowa can actually predict the future. There’s something in Gaila’s eyes, in the way she carries herself...well, Jim can easily imagine Gaila working magic. 

“What do you steal?” he asks. 

Gaila shrugs. “All kinds of things. Credits, if they’re unregistered, but that’s pretty rare. Whatever I can get away with, mostly. And not from people in the hotel, by the way; Jerry and I have an arrangement. I steer clear of the rooms. But if people want to get wasted and act like idiots in the bar, then hey. Anything can happen.” She waves her hands around for emphasis.

That doesn’t strictly sound like a moratorium on robbing hotel patrons, but it’s not Jim’s deal, so he keeps quiet on the subject. “So what do you do with the stuff you get? Sell it?” 

She nods. “I’ll take you to the market sometime. Not the market-market, with the trade stalls all set up for travelers. The other market.” The way she says it makes her thoughts on the superior market crystal clear. 

“You know anyone who deals with papers? If someone wanted to get off the base?” 

She narrows her eyes at him. “You planning on leaving anytime soon?” 

“I dunno. Just keeping my options open.” 

“I might, then. I’ll ask around.” 

“Thanks. And hey, I want to...maybe I can help.” 

“I _dunno_ ,” she says, mimicking. “I’m kind of a one-woman show.” 

“And if you want to know a secret, I’m kind of experienced.” 

“Hmmph. You got caught, obviously. How experienced can you be?” 

He lunges at her then, grabs her by the shoulders and wrestles her to the mattress as she giggles like crazy-- _Jim, stop, you’re spilling my drink, ugh I don’t even know you and I hate you already--_

He’s not planning on letting her up until she admits that he’s objectively awesome in a multitude of ways, never mind the fact that they just met. But then she starts in on her modus operandi and it’s so fucking genius that Jim forgets all about being an asshole and lets her hold court while he listens, rapt. 

“It’s hard to explain,” she says. “It’s easier if I just show you sometime.” 

Sometime ends up being two nights later. Gaila comes home with a new set of clothes for him, which Jim assumes are of questionable origin until Gaila sets him straight (“I’m not heartless, Jim, I don’t just steal the clothes off people’s backs!”). 

They’re actually kind of good looking, the first nice clothes he’s had in forever, and Jim can’t help but do a little 360 in front of the mirror. He tries to think of the last time he cared how he looked--back on Tarsus, maybe, right when they got there. There was a school dance, and Jim spent way too much time worrying about which shirt to wear. 

_“Obviously the blue,” Sam said, rolling his eyes and absconding with the black one that was Jim’s other option. “Everyone goes apeshit over your eyes.”_

Gaila looks at him appreciatively in the mirror. “You clean up nicely,” she says. “That’s part of it, you know. You have to look the part.” 

“The part of what?” Jim plucks some lint off the sleeve of his jacket; the fabric is thick and bronzey brown, the weave dense. It’s obviously well-made and probably cost somebody a lot of credits once upon a time. There’s a suspicious dark stain on the inner lining, but you can’t see it from the outside. 

“The part of someone who’s not going to rob you blind.” She leans into the light like an actress backstage, dabbing on winey gloss and smacking her lips together. “How old do you think I look?” 

“I don’t know, twenty? At least? How old are you?” 

She grins. “Seventeen. How about you?” 

"Sixteen.” 

She cuffs him on the arm. “Aw, you’re like my baby brother.” 

Jim swallows. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Guess so.” 

Once Gaila’s ready, she does a little spin for him. Jim has to admit, all dressed up like this she’s like some alternate version of herself, somehow sweeter-smelling and softer in focus, like he’s looking at her through a pane of glass smeared with something unctuous. The old holos, the movies...didn’t they rub something on the lenses to make actresses look this way? This strange aura seems to fan out into the air around Gaila. 

As they walk down the street later he realizes other people notice it too, male and female and everything in between, though some look more blatantly than others. Jim starts to feel a little drunk with it, drunk and heady, like if Gaila told him to take a long walk out of a short airlock he’d probably just go with it. 

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks, pulling her into a corner and letting go as soon as humanly possible, because he’s starting not to like the way his fingers want to twitch all over her. 

She taps Jim on the nose. “How much do you know about Orions?” 

“Not that much.” 

“Pheromones,” she says. “You know what those are?” 

He nods. “Oh my god.” 

“I take suppressants,” she says. “When I have to, when I’m going to be around people who aren’t marks for a long time. You’re costing me a lot already, by the way, those things aren’t cheap.” 

He’s losing himself in the neckline of her dress. “What? Oh, sorry.” 

She crooks a finger under his chin and firmly redirects his gaze. “They make enhancers too. Ordinarily it wouldn’t hit you so hard, I don’t think, but I took one tonight. You’ll get used to it the longer we’re together.” 

She peers into his eyes; they feel cloudy, heavy with that soft-focus glaze. She makes a face. “Maybe this was a bad idea. I don’t know if you’re going to be able to keep your head.” 

“No, I can, I…” He blinks and turns away from her, taking deep breaths. “What if we split up? You go in and I’ll follow in a little bit. When I’ve got my head right. It’s not like I’m going to talk to you in there anyway.” His head starts to clear and he takes another step away. 

Gaila bites her lip, considering. “That might work. But if you lose it in there, I’m ditching you. In fact, I should probably ditch you anyway. Meet you back home.” 

“What if something happens?” 

“It’ll be fine.” She reaches up and squeezes his shoulder, just for a second. “Catch you later. I’m going to the Thirsty Tribble; it’s like three blocks that way. You can’t miss it.” 

“Yeah, I’ll bet not. That’s the worst name ever.” 

She wrinkles her nose. “Tell me about it.” Then she winks at him, spins on her heel, and is gone. 

Jim drags himself across the street to a bench, nerve endings screeching at the loss of Gaila and her opioid thrall. The streets are pretty crowded for the relatively late hour, but here in the entertainment district that’s nothing out of the ordinary. There’s a bar or a club on every block, and the clientele are as varied as the establishments are. Apparently Gaila has a kind of circuit worked out that makes sense to no one but her and depends on things like the Romulan and Klingon stock markets, her monthly earnings, and from what Jim can tell, the phases of the holomoon. Missy Lim’s tarot cards would’ve been right at home. 

“The Tribble is easy pickings,” she said before they left the hotel. “Middle of the road clientele, but they like to get drunk. Plus there are a couple regulars that know me; they’ll have my back if I get in the shit.” 

“How do you figure?” 

“Well, they’re antiques dealers, if you get my drift. Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours kind of a thing.” 

“Are you sure you’re only seventeen?” he asked. 

She gave him a look then that Jim was at a loss to interpret, and something in her seemed to dull. But then she blinked it away, and she was Gaila again, resplendent and beckoning and dripping with biochemical enhancement. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get out there.” 

Jim watches a Romulan couple stroll up the street, engaged in what appears to be a lively and alcohol-fueled debate on something Jim can’t quite make out. It’s weird; he’s never spent a whole lot of time thinking about Romulans just going about their lives, working and loving and raising families. He guesses that’s what they do; they have to come from somewhere. But something about these two seems so foreign, out of time almost, as if he’s watching some kind of living historical tableau. 

Jim doesn’t remember much before the Romulans came. He was five when they look Earth, for starters, though they’d taken Jim’s dad the day he was born. Between that and his age, it wasn’t like he could remember some innocent halcyon time before he knew they were out there, pissed off at nothing and everything and perpetually spoiling for a fight.

He remembers the day they came: shot New York and Mumbai and Den Haag off the face of the planet and threatened to do the same everywhere else if the humans didn’t go quietly. They’d only made it to Earth in the first place by cutting a swath through Starfleet, so it wasn’t as if Earth had had a whole lot of choice in the matter. But that’s not what Jim remembers, through the vague remove of time. He remembers his mom listening to the news, bundling Jim and Sam down to the ancient cellar and making them spend the night with the desiccated remains of his great-grandma’s root vegetables and dusty jars of jam, waiting for the bombs to start falling. Winona would run up to the house periodically and check the networks, leaving Jim and Sam to freak each other out telling ghost stories and making up dumb games to pass the time in the musty, dirt-floored room. A day later, it became apparent that Riverside wasn’t getting blown to smithereens in the immediate future, and she let them come back out. 

By then, Earth was technically a protectorate of the Romulan Empire, complete with a puppet government and a crippled fleet destined for replacement with mean-looking Romulan spacecraft. The Romulans dragged a bunch of the older Starfleet vessels out to the Riverside Shipyards, once they’d stripped their warp cores and pried the last of the dilithium from deep in the ships’ veins. Years later, Jim dug under the fence to explore the rusting hulks that had been the fleet’s flagships. 

The Romulan couple have disappeared down the street, and it’s time to go, Jim decides. He slides off the bench and heads in the direction of the Thirsty Tribble, as unmissable as Gaila promised thanks to the rotund puffball gracing the sign hanging over the door. The place is packed, and as Jim steps inside he’s hit with a wave of pheromones so strong he almost doubles over. He’d been momentarily worried about getting checked for ID, but if there was a doorman he’s long gone now. Jim lingers in the doorway, where the air’s a little clearer, but then a crowd comes in behind him and he’s forced to move forward. He takes a last gulp of air and lets himself be folded into the crowd. 

He doesn’t see Gaila at first, but he hears her, laughter rippling through the crowd like water. He moves to one side and then she’s visible, flashes of green here and there. The room has the same slippery quality that the attic did before they left, and Jim shakes his head to try and clear it. 

He’s got enough cash on him for a drink, courtesy of Gaila, so he elbows carefully past all manner of alien bodies until he gets up to the bar. The bartender is slammed, and it takes a solid ten minutes for him to get around to Jim’s order. It doesn’t matter, though; all the better for observation. Jim doesn’t really need a drink, anyway. The pheromones are doing a fine job all on their own. He leans against the bar and traces circles on the surface with his finger and watches Gaila work the room. 

She flits around so quickly he can’t keep track, her marks hazy with lust, barely able to follow her or muster much irritation at the way she’ll spin from one to the next and back again. She’s been bought twenty drinks tonight, he’s sure, and hasn’t had a sip of one of them. Jim doesn’t know quite what he expected to see, but he doesn’t even catch a glimpse of the movements that might indicate Gaila’s hand in a purse or a pocket. 

And then she’s gone, just like that. Jim blinks around the room, but she’s nowhere to be found, apparently having made good on her plans to ditch him. Well, that’s okay, he thinks. There’s not much point in sticking around now that Gaila’s gone, and a decent number of the bar’s patrons seem to agree. Jim slips past them into the street and loiters around on the sidewalk for a little while, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Eventually, he makes his way back to the hotel, the holomoon high overhead and the crowds thinning as the hour gets later. 

Jim finds Gaila in her room, sitting at the creaky, flaking vanity and rubbing a cloth over her face. She dips it into a bowl of herbal-smelling water, swipes it over her cheek one last time and blinks at him in the mirror. 

“Hi,” she says. “I took my suppressant.” 

“Hey,” Jim says. “Good night?” 

Gaila gestures toward the bed. “See for yourself.” 

There’s a pile in the middle of the mattress, like a collection of assorted eggs in a bird’s nest. Jim bends over it, picking out a couple comm units, one battered but the other new tech, slick and expensive. There’s a rare unmarked credit chip, a chrono, and a strange-looking piece of jewelry, a pendant of heavy synthgold on a thick chain. 

“How the hell did you get this?” 

Gaila pokes at it, fingering one of the links of chain. “It’s broken, see? Came right off.” 

Jim shakes his head. “Impressive,” he says. “I gotta say. But shit, Gaila, aren’t you worried about getting caught?” 

She shrugs. “I’ve gotten close a couple times, but only a couple. And I can usually, uh, distract them some other way, if I need to.” 

Jim turns away, a bad taste in his mouth. 

“But I’ve been doing this for awhile now,” Gaila continues, “and I’m good at picking them. Plus can tell if I’m getting to them, how far gone they are and everything.”  
She looks like she believes it, but Jim catches her making a face. The look makes him think he doesn’t want to hear about any of those near misses, and that Gaila doesn’t much want to share. She sorts her loot and hides it away in her chest, trading it for the bottle of Andorian booze, which she sloshes matter-of-factly into their mugs. 

“Cheers,” she says, drinking it down. “I dunno about you, but I’m beat. I’m crashing, and tomorrow I can show you how we turn this stuff into credits.” 

She strips off her dress without pretense. She’s wearing a black undershirt that’s worn thin with use, and Jim studiously does not look at her boobs. She shuts the lights off and he’s left staring up at the ceiling, the patterns the moonlight makes as it sets. The rest of the base, Jim imagines, is sleeping. With Gaila warm and soft beside him, smelling of incense, Jim doesn’t feel nearly as lonely as he should. Instead, he feels like he’s got a secret, figured something out that no one else has, and when he drifts off to sleep he does it with a smile on his face.

***

They sleep predictably late the next day, and when Jim finally blinks awake it’s almost afternoon. Gaila stirs at about the same time; at some point during the night they’ve come together so they’re pressed back to belly, which Jim is all too aware of this morning. He shifts back on the mattress as delicately as he can, holding his breath, but if Gaila notices she doesn’t let on. Eventually, she rolls off the mattress and stretches, arms over her head and elbows flexing at an angle Jim’s pretty sure his own joints are incapable of.

“I’m hungry,” she says. “Let’s get a move on, the market’s not open all day.” 

They dress quickly at Gaila’s urging, Jim mixing his fancy outfit of the previous evening with the simpler stuff he got from N’Shira, which he’s been washing piecemeal when he can slip something into the hotel laundry. Gaila seems keyed up, but it’s a happy, buzzy kind of energy, and Jim finds it infectious. The holosky is clear when they go outside, the dark teal Jim somehow knows matches the sky on Romulus. Gaila leads him through the streets, cutting off of the main thoroughfares to wend their way through little alleys like shaded canyons, buildings jutting up on either side. Eventually they come to a place that seems to be a dead end, the road terminating at a smooth grey wall. Gaila elbows Jim and nods at a dirty sheet hung over a gap in the wall he hadn’t noticed before. As she pulls him through, he has the strange impulse to hold his breath, like they’re diving underwater or going through an airlock. It’s fitting, though, because when they come through and he looks around it’s as if they’re in another world altogether. 

For one thing, there’s not a Romulan in sight. Jim finds it immediately reassuring, a knot of tension uncoiling deep in his belly. They’re in another alley, and what the space lacks in pointy-ears it makes up for in other species. Right off the bat, Jim can pick out at least two other Orions, a handful of humans, and an Andorian, although there are a bunch more beings he can’t identify. The market is vibrant, colors and smells rising from all corners. It continues down the alley for about a hundred yards, divided and subdivided into booths with hung sheets and boards, here a wall of blinking tech, there a wiry reptiloid hunched over a steaming pot. Jim is overwhelmed, but as usual Gaila seems to know exactly where she’s going. 

“C’mon,” she says. “Business first, then fun stuff.” 

Jim wonders if he should bother asking what exactly she means by “fun stuff.” 

Gaila marches them through the cramped aisles, shoving aside a tattered curtain to reveal a ramshackle market stall staffed by a sketchy looking Andorian who reminds Jim of Jerry from the hotel. 

“He’s Jerry’s brother,” Gaila says, like she knows what he’s thinking. Gaila deposits last night’s spoils on the table in front of Jerry’s brother. His antennae twitch. 

“This all you got?” he says. 

Gaila scoffs. “Are you kidding me? Look at this, it’s a brand new model comm unit. I haven’t gotten one of these yet, I’ve barely even seen any around.”

Jerry’s brother picks the unit up gingerly between thumb and forefinger. “Well, whoever you ganked this from was obviously an early adopter. That or he threw it down the recycler by mistake and had to fish it back out.” 

“Whatever, man,” Gaila says. “There’s a tiny little scuff on one corner and that’s it.” 

Jim shifts on one side and tries not to look too obtrusive. Haggling makes him uncomfortable, and it isn’t letting up anytime soon. Gaila and the Andorian continue in this vein for awhile, Jim purposefully casting his eye about for anything to distract him, scuffing his boot on the cracked dirt floor of the stall. After awhile, he goes outside, thinking to poke around for himself, though he doesn’t have anything much to bargain with. He picks through a rackful of clothing across the way, assorted shirts and jackets, a motley collection assembled like the contents of some intergalactic lint trap. There’s something that he could swear is an old ‘Fleet uniform; he thinks he remembers it from some of his parents’ old pictures. He shoves it aside quickly, tries not to let his fingers linger too long on the fabric. Next to it is a pretty cool leather jacket, which makes for a decent distraction. It’s black, a dusty, tarry black just this side of brown, worn and rich with patina. 

Jim takes the jacket off its hanger and feels the heft of it, hears the crack and squeak of the leather. It’s in decent shape; there’s a rip or two in the lining and in the leather itself, but Jim’s a farm boy and a Tarsus vet besides, and he knows how to mend when he has to. He looks around him. The proprietress of the clothing stall, a tall and thin human woman, is fighting with a huffy Tellarite over what looks like a tulle ballgown. Jim shrugs into the jacket, feeling like he’s doing something illicit. But hey, she’s trying to sell clothes, right? Trying on the merchandise is totally kosher. There’s a scrap of mirror nailed to the wall, and he peers past a smear of mud at his reflection. 

“Looks good on you,” says the shopkeeper, her narrow face appearing next to his in the mirror. 

Jim spins around, caught out. “Oh, um, sorry,” he says. “I just…” 

“Oh, no, by all means,” she says, gesturing deferentially. “50 credits, just so you know.” 

Jim tries not to roll his eyes. It’s a good looking jacket, but come on. He takes it off, puts it back on the hanger as carefully as he can. “Thanks, but I’m just looking.” 

“We take trades,” she says hurriedly. “On a case by case basis, of course.” 

“I’m not sure I--”

“Your boots,” she says. Before Jim can decline, she’s kneeling at his feet, plucking at the hem of his pants. “Very nice. Real leather, which is saying a lot these days. And I can tell you’re a connoisseur.” She sits back on her heels, staring at the boots for a second before looking back up at Jim.

“I’ll take ‘em,” she says. “Straight swap for the jacket.” 

Jim wasn’t expecting it, and he feels momentarily as if the air’s been knocked out of his lungs. Sam silhouetted against a too-blue sky, squinting into the bright afternoon. Sam on the shuttle down to the surface, nose pressed to the window like he wasn’t way too old and cool to be excited. A new colony, a fresh start, and Mom was who knows where out in the black but it’ll be okay, Jimmy, you’ll see--

“Um,” Jim says, shaking his head. “I...sorry, but no.” 

“Aw, come on,” she says, cajoling. “I mean, you can go change your shoes and come back.” 

“They’re not for sale,” he says. His mouth is dry. 

She gets up, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Well, I wasn’t offering to buy them,” she says, like the very idea is totally ridiculous. 

Whatever, Jim thinks. They’re worth half the crap in this booth. 

“Jim?” Gaila has emerged from Jerry’s brother’s _bureau de change_ or whatever and is looking at him expectantly. “Everything okay?” 

“Yeah,” Jim says, too quickly. He shoves the hanger back onto the rack, giving the leather a last look. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He steps out of the booth without a second glance, but he can feel the thin woman’s eyes on him. 

“Good,” says Gaila, looking slightly dubious. “I’m all done, and I don’t know about you, but I’m _starving_ and there’s this stall that sells Orion street food. Man, I hope they’re open today, because they make the best _sleszzik_.I mean, it’s not exactly authentic but there’s just something about it.” 

“Sounds good,” Jim says. “Lead on.” 

Gaila looks at him hard for a long moment. She smiles at him, wide and clear enough for anyone to see, but there’s something about it that feels like it’s just for Jim. _I know_ , it says. _I know._ She reaches out and takes his hand, like Jim’s a child who might wander off, and tugs him along in search of food. 

Later, they sit on a stoop and stuff themselves silly. Jim stopped being able to feel his mouth ten minutes ago; as it turns out, Orion food is scorchingly spicy. Gaila chews with her eyes closed, face the picture of bliss.

“Anyway,” she says, swallowing. “The sleeves were a little short on you. And those boots are classic. Would’ve been a huge mistake.” 

“Yeah,” Jim says. She’s got an orange blob of sauce on her cheek, and for a second he thinks about reaching for it, wiping her clean. “Yeah, you’re right.” 

“I’m always right,” says Gaila.

“You’ve got a little something,” Jim says. “Right there.”

***

That night at the Tribble is the first time Jim tails Gaila, but it isn’t the last. Much to Gaila’s surprise, Jim manages to tag along without losing his shit. Whether it’s sheer force of will or loss of sensitivity to Gaila’s pheromones, he’s not sure, but he slips into the bars and clubs after her and slips into a pleasant haze of awareness as he watches her work.

By day, they go to the market if it’s open. Jim gets over his haggling block. Once or twice he’s even scored them better prices with Jerry’s brother, whose real name is something Jim has trouble pronouncing. He’s not sure his tongue is meant to bend that way, and Gaila just laughs at him when he tries. By night, they work, unless the take has been good for a few days straight or Gaila’s indecipherable schedule calls for a break. Those nights, they stay in and play elaborate Orion card games, or watch one of Gaila’s three holos, or get drunk and stay up into the wee hours talking about nothing and everything. 

“Tell me about how you got here,” Jim says one night. He’s sitting cross-legged on the mattress in a romantic beam of light from the holomoon, and it seems a good a time as any for deep conversation. Gaila purses her lips and takes a long swallow of her drink. When she looks up again, her eyes are shining. 

“You sure you wanna hear this?” she asks roughly. 

Jim’s not, but he nods anyway. “I mean, if you don’t mind talking about it.” 

Gaila’s quiet for what seems like forever. She gets to her feet and goes over to the vermillion rectangle of fabric that’s draped across a corner of the room, what passes for a closet door. Jim has a foot or so of closet space now, now that he’s amassed a wardrobe beyond his refashioned prison fatigues. She fishes out a hoodie and pulls it over her head, face emerging surrounded by a cloud of red hair, then plops back down next to Jim again. 

“It’s getting cold,” she says, even though it isn’t. Then, “I was 13 when I left Orion.” 

Jim doesn’t say anything, just scoots closer to her on the bed. Their knees are just shy of touching and he imagines he can feel warmth flow between them, like that might make this whole thing softer somehow. 

“I don’t know a lot about Terra,” she says. “I don’t know what it was like before the Romulans came, but on Orion it was--it was kind of rough. You know the Syndicate, right?” 

Jim nods. Everyone knows the Syndicate, even if it’s just through pirate stories and the weird gutteral drinking songs rumored to come from Orion alehalls. Jim only knows those because of Frank, but whatever. 

“The Syndicate’s for life,” Gaila says. “You want out, you’re signing death warrants for you and your whole clan. And my clan mother wanted out. When the pointy-ears came, it was nuts, and she got my sisters and me on a transport leaving in the middle of all of it. She didn’t much care where for, just that it was off-planet. It ended up on Wrigley’s.” 

Jim thinks about her scar. He opens his mouth to speak, but Gaila holds up a hand to still him. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” she says. “I...I made it out okay, obviously. We got separated after the ship docked--there were seven of us--but Tefa and I were together, and she was older. She looked out for me. So we had this little nest together, and she worked and tried to teach me what she could in the evenings, all the stuff our clan mother would have taught me.” 

Jim thinks about their garret, the shabby warmth of it, and wonders if “nest” is a trick of translation. He decides he likes it, either way. “What’d she teach you?” 

“Oh, you know. Math and physics.” She laughs at Jim’s poorly-concealed surprise. “What, you thought it was all smoke and mirrors and, like, lap dancing? We _are_ warp-capable. We had to figure that out somehow, just like you humans did.” 

“I...uh…” 

“I’m messing with you.” 

Jim’s face is hot. “I knew that.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, okay. I mean, she taught me lap dancing too. Not really, but you can modulate your pheromones with movement, and she taught me that. And to pick pockets. Just in case.” She sighs, looking down at her hands. 

“One night a couple years back, she didn’t come home. Our landlord was a dick; he barely gave it a day before he sold me out to her bosses at the bathhouse. He said we owed back rent, but Tefa was the biggest tightwad, I know she had us covered every month. 

“Anyway,” she says, dragging her hand across her eyes. “That sucked. And that’s how I got this”--she pushes up her sleeve and waves her scar at him-- “which also sucked. But I guess you know that.” 

Jim holds his hand out, palm up, and the second before she takes it seems to stretch out forever. But then she does, finally. She takes his hand and turns it over in her own, tracing the lines of Jim’s finger bones. 

“You’re here now, though,” he says. He’s pretty sure his heart is pounding loud enough for her to hear. 

“I am. It took a while, to figure out that I could go. I mean, I couldn’t legally, of course, but that was bullshit; everyone knows the Romulans have an agreement with the Syndicate and _they_ can go fuck themselves.” She sighs. The Federation was trying to dismantle the Syndicate, you know. That’s why those _tshvari_ clans were so hot and heavy to get into bed with them during the invasion.” 

“Uh, pretty sure human trafficking is just wrong, full stop,” Jim says. “You don’t need, like, legal justification for wanting to get out of that whole scene.” 

“If Tefa really did owe back rent, the landlord flipped me fair and square,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s different for us, Jim. It...it wouldn’t have been honorable to just skip out on a debt.” She flips her hair back over her shoulders reflexively. “Maybe my Standard is bad--”

“Your Standard’s fine, Gaila, it’s just--you’re talking about your life!” 

“You don’t get it,” she says. “I don’t expect you to get it. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because I left. I just wish I knew what really happened.” 

“What happened to your sister, you mean.” 

“All of it.” She exhales, sending little tendrils of russet hair aflutter. “So, okay, what actually happened after I decided to get the fuck out was that Jerry showed up.” 

Jim snorts. “You’re kidding me,” he says. “Jerry from downstairs?” 

She smiles. “Poor dude was just trying to get a salt scrub or something; he wandered in thinking the bathhouse was a day spa.” 

“I’m not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse.” 

Gaila winces. “Uh, maybe you should reserve judgement on that front.” 

“Oh my god, Gaila, what’d you do to Jerry?” 

“Nothing! Just...just blackmailed him. Or threatened to. Only a little bit! It wasn’t my fault, Jim, he was so freaked out. It was too easy, and I didn’t have a better plan, and so I just kind of went with it. And, I mean, we hashed it all out later, and it was fine. We’re sitting in his hotel, aren’t we?” 

“Yeah, how’d you score this place after all that?” 

“I got him to smuggle me out of there. Well, I actually got him to, uh, rent me. But we went for coffee and I...explained the situation, and after that he offered to help. I got rid of my chip, we skipped town, and now here I am.” 

Jim scrubs a hand over his face. “That’s crazy,” he says. “You...you’re crazy, Gaila.” 

She grins. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.” 

“You should.” 

He expects her to ask about him next, but she doesn’t. She just winks at him and drains the rest of her drink. “I’m beat,” she says. “You ready to turn in?” 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess so.” 

They lie in the dark, staring up at the ceiling. Jim can tell from her breathing that Gaila’s not asleep. He feels full of words, of more questions, but speaking doesn’t exactly seem fair after what she’s already told him tonight, unabashedly and without reciprocation. He rolls over onto his side and props himself up on an elbow, watching the moonlight on her face. 

“Gaila,” he says softly, and she turns. 

“Hmm?” 

Jim’s mind blanks out, and then he’s leaning over to kiss her softly on the mouth. He cups her face with his hand, and for a split second everything’s hearts and flowers before she takes his hand in hers for the second time tonight, moves his hand away and turns her head. He can feel her wrinkle her nose. With his face. It’s demoralizing. 

“Jim--” 

He groans, rolling over and burying his face in the pillow. She’s laughing, which is terrible. 

“Aw, Jim, come on.” 

“No,” he says, muffled by the pillow. “No, no, I’m just...going to live here now. Or forever, forever will work too.” 

“I’m sorry,” she says, still giggling. “I start laughing sometimes when I’m, uh, stressed, it’s a stress reaction--” 

“Oh, so I’m stressing you out now? That’s great, Gaila.” 

“Will you move your face? I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” 

He concedes, peering out from behind a mound of pillow. Her face is still mostly obscured, so he only wants to die about 60% more than he did before. “So that’s a no, then?” 

She rests her hand on his shoulder. “I’m flattered,” she says. 

“Oh my _god._ ” 

“I am! I’m just--you’re my friend, Jim, and--” 

“Nah, I get it, I get it. I’m sorry.” 

She spreads out next to him, flattening the pillow out with her hand so they can see eye to eye. “It’s fine,” she says. “It’s fine.” She looks at him until he has to close his eyes, and after that they’re quiet for so long that the logical course of action is just to go to sleep. Hopefully he can chalk it all up to a dream in the morning.

Gaila blessedly doesn’t bring up Jim’s unfortunate kiss the next day, which is great because Jim’s decided that the best course of action is to carry on as though nothing ever happened. He’s grateful that Gaila seems to concur, though he’d be lying if he said he didn’t spend the occasional solitary moment alternately berating himself and wistfully gazing at nothing. So when Gaila comes to him a few days afterward with a proposal, he’s suspicious. 

“You’re not just doing this because you feel bad for me, are you?” They’re walking back from the market, Jim swinging a bag of fat purple _hivat_ fruit at his side. 

She rolls her eyes and sidesteps a deep crack in the sidewalk. “Jeez, they’re really letting this place go. And what are you talking about? No. I’m doing this because it makes sense--you’re quick, and most of the time you’re smart. And we could theoretically be raking in twice the credits if you help me.” 

“So we’re like partners in crime.” 

Gaila elbows him. “I prefer to think of you as my apprentice. For now, anyway.” 

Jim will take it. 

He starts out practicing on Gaila, first in their room and then out on the street. Then she enlists Jerry, although it quickly becomes apparent that he’d rather remain ignorant to the intricacies of Gaila’s business practices. So his involvement is limited to a couple of scenarios they stage out on the street, Gaila distracting Jerry with some dropped item or wardobe malfunction and Jim swooping in to steal his credit chip. 

After Jerry cuts out, Jim just practices on Gaila again. She explains the theory beforehand--use your index and middle finger, Gaila says, the thumb will bump your mark and call their attention--and then when they hit the bars at night he tries and largely fails to watch the practice. He’s not entirely sure he’s going to be any good at it. Back on Tarsus he was always more of a smash-and-grab kind of thief, though if all else fails, he’s a pretty fast runner. In retrospect, that they even decide to try this is monumentally stupid. Sketchy bathroom surgery aside, Jim is still a fugitive of the Empire. So’s Gaila, for that matter. But it’s easy to forget here, where actual Romulans seem to be few and far between, stopping at the base for a drink or a meal before making their connections to other more important destinations, leaving Starbase 16 to the outworlders who keep it running. Even the Guard stationed here seem to have better things to do half the time. 

Jim watches them drill in the greenspace sometimes when he feels like living dangerously. He guesses the base is some kind of training ground for new recruits, before they’re sent off to deal with things that actually matter. He watches the officers put a rotating set of doughy, noodle-limbed men and women through through their paces, all sweat and healing tattoos. He knows the hearsay about Romulans and ink, that they etch their losses in their skin, but he’s hard pressed to believe these newbies have lost anyone more meaningful than pet goldfish. Maybe a puppy, if he’s feeling charitable, and if they even have dogs on Romulus. 

Their hair shines in the holosun, black-capped heads bobbing in formation, and Jim thinks about N’Shira, about Spock. He wonders if Spock ever got the database up and running. He’s got a feeling there are about a zillion bugs that need fixing. He got the impression Spock was sharp when it came to that kind of thing--he’d always seemed better suited to an office block somewhere than at the head of a barracks, but what did Jim know? Besides, Spock would look like a veritable commando next to the grunting line of rookies currently getting reamed out by their sublieutenants. One of them is bent over at the waist, gasping, and he turns his head to look at Jim, idling on the grass. Jim’s got an apple, a rare find at the market that probably fell off the back of a transport from one of the agricolonies, and he makes a show of tossing it up over his head. He catches it neatly and rubs it to a shine on his shirt before taking a juicy bite. The Romulan glares at him, and Jim looks away and laughs.

***

They scout for a couple of nights before Jim’s big debut; Gaila leaves the hotel early one morning announcing she’s doing reconnaissance and that Jim isn’t allowed along, but when she returns she has the name of the bar they’re going to hit. It has a long, fancy-sounding name in Romulan Jim doesn’t bother to fully translate; some arcane literary reference or other. He’s seen the exterior, but he’s never been inside.

“It’s a nice place,” Gaila says. “That’s why I picked it. We shouldn’t need to hang out for long before we get our money’s worth, as it were.” 

“You think we should go case it or whatever? See what we’re working with?” 

Gaila gives him an odd look. “Um, no,” she says. “That won’t be necessary. But we’re going to have to reassess your wardrobe, because you need to look the part.” 

They end up with a combination of raiding Jerry’s closet (“Gaila, _promise me_ he’s not going to do anything illegal in this suit!”), buying a pair of dress shoes on credit, and running the one semi-formal shirt Jim’s got through the laundry ‘cycler about fifteen times before Gaila declares it acceptable. 

“Just keep your jacket buttoned,” she says, grimacing at him and picking an imaginary speck of lint off his lapel. Her finishing touch is a tie she unearths from the bottom of the treasure chest over by the bed, the origin of which she refuses to reveal. 

They linger in the shadows in the alley next to the bar, which is definitely not suspicious at all, but Gaila puts the pheromone whammy on any passersby so Jim just goes with it. 

“Okay,” Gaila says, pacing a tight loop in front of him. “We’ve been over and over this, so we’re just going to...go for it. The way we practiced. And it goes without saying that once we get inside, we’re strangers. So if anything happens--” 

“You’re not going to save me,” Jim says. “Believe me, we’ve gone over your pirate code or whatever a million times. I get it.” 

“It’s not a code, Jim, it’s just common sense.” She heaves a sigh, like she’s trying to bleed off some of the tension. He can relate. His palms are sweating like he’s back on Vulcan. “Oh, one more thing, before I forget--” She pats at her coat pockets, drawing out a little packet and handing it to Jim. 

“It’s a blocker,” she says. “For, uh, for me. I figure you need every possible wit about you.” She punches him in the arm. “Not that that’s saying much.” 

He makes a face. “Okay, so who’s going in first?” 

“You go,” she says. “And look, don’t be too ambitious, okay? Just...maybe just do one and then get the hell out and go cool your heels at the Tribble or something.” 

He nods. “Quit worrying. It’s going to be fine. I’ll catch you later, yeah?” 

She nods once, tightly, and melts back into the shadows. Jim takes a deep breath, tries to quell the pounding of his heart, and goes inside. The bar is as elegantly appointed as its name implies, smooth white walls and touches of what could almost pass for real wood. Maybe it actually is. He stands up a little straighter, trying to project the air of someone who’s supposed to be here. The crowd is mostly Romulan, tall and impossibly cool-looking women who wouldn’t give a human the time of day in a million years and men who are an even mix of brutish and pretty. Some of them look at Jim like they might have a few uses for a human, the thought of which makes him feel funny in ways he opts not to catalogue just now. It’s bad to be noticed. He needs to blend. He makes his way up to a far side of the bar and orders a drink. The bartender is human, and his gaze flicks over Jim’s face disinterestedly. 

_Good_ , Jim thinks. 

He turns around, sipping his drink and surveying the room. The faces that looked up as he came in have all settled and returned to whatever they were doing, conversing or conspiring or whatever. Now he just needs to pick one of them. He bites his lip, worrying it between his teeth. Gaila’s pheromone blocker should keep him sharp enough, but he’s nervous anyway, wants to be as sharp as possible. He scans the room again, from right to left and back. That final time, something catches his attention. Over in the corner is a human man, older. He’s sitting on a stool at a high, candlelit table across from a Romulan woman whose back is to Jim. Jim’s first thought is that he looks like he’s not a bad guy, but shit, empathy for his potential mark is not the place Jim needs to go right now. The man is well-dressed, none of the right angles and shoulder pads that the Romulans are so into, and even from a distance Jim can see his clothes are quality. He’s slim but not skinny, and his face is lightly lined with age. He says something to his companion and she laughs, shifting just slightly to one side to reveal a carafe of champagne on ice. The good stuff. 

_Seems like a good a choice as any,_ Jim thinks to himself. So now all he has to do is wait. It won’t do to just sit around and stare at this guy, but Jim doesn’t want him to walk either. He takes up his drink and finds a spot at the end of one of the long communal tables that’s roughly diagonal with the man’s. Jim is facing him, so if he looks over in that direction from time to time it’s not overly conspicuous. He’s on the edge of a boisterous crowd, sitting next to a violet-skinned alien whose species Jim is at a loss to identify. In another situation, he might be interested in finding out a few more salient details, or at least fantasizing about doing so, especially considering that things with Gaila are kaput before they even started. But tonight he’s trying to stay focused, dammit, and she keeps, like, looking over at him and then whispering to her friends. He flashes her a brief smile and then looks back over at Silver Fox in the corner, still embroiled in conversation with his tablemate. Whatever they’re talking about, it looks serious; some of the earlier softness seems to have leached out of the man’s face, replaced with a flinty taking-care-of-business stare. 

The violet girl elbows Jim, jostling his still-full cup. “Oops,” she says. “Sorry about that.” 

“S’okay,” he says. He feels his face starting to get hot. Thank god it’s dark in here.

She goes back to her friends for a minute, then-- “You come here a lot?” 

“Um, not really,” he says. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the man moving, getting up from the table. _C’mon, c’mon, don’t leave,_ Jim thinks. It’s not the end of the world, he can find someone else. It’s not even the end of the world if he goes home empty-handed, not really, but the thought of it irks him. He’s spent too long being a pain in Gaila’s ass for not nearly enough return on the investment. Sure, maybe he’s company, but Jim’s not an idiot. It’s not like he doesn’t know how much simpler things are with only yourself to worry about. He’d envied Sam a lot, some days, but never that. Not after Winona left. The man is only headed for the bar, so Jim relaxes just a fraction. He comes back after a few minutes have passed, bearing two cups. He and the woman toast to something, smile, drink. 

The violet girl says something, but Jim isn’t paying attention. She looks at him expectantly, but he just shoots her the awkward smile again. She shakes her head slightly, as if she can’t quite believe he’s really being this much of an idiot. She turns back to her group, angling her body so her back is to Jim, but he doesn’t care because the man’s companion is getting up. 

He gets to his feet too, nodding at her and saying something Jim can’t hear. She takes something out of her pocket and hands it to him: an envelope, some kind of flimsy synthetic that reminds Jim of the old letters he’s read about. The man glances inside. Whatever he sees seems to impress him, his eyebrows shooting up to his hairline. He nods at her again, slowly, and says something else, to which she declines her head, raises a hand to his shoulder and turns to leave. The man watches her go, and Jim watches him. Then he slips the envelope into the pocket of his jacket and makes for the bar again, ostensibly to settle his tab. 

He can practically hear Gaila whispering in his ear. _Now, go now._

Watching a mark pay for something makes it easier, gives you something to go on besides an ambiguous lump in a pocket that could be a wallet or could be a wad of tissues. A used wad of tissues, if some of Gaila’s horror stories are true. 

Jim rises from the table, following the man into the press of the crowd, turning sideways to better slip among them without jostling, which would call attention to him. He gets up behind the man and turns around so they’re back to back. Jim’s still clutching his drink like his life depends on it, though it occurs to him that maybe he should have left it at the table. 

“ _Khnai’ra_ ,” the man says. _Thank you._ He turns, and Jim watches him go before following at a second’s remove. He watches the man replace his wallet--left side pocket of his jacket. Easy pickings, or at least Gaila would say so. Jim sets his drink on an empty table and wipes the collected condensation off on his pants leg.

Jim catches up to the man at the door; the bar is at capacity, and there’s a bit of a bottleneck as the doorman tries to monitor who’s leaving and who can come in. There’s a woman in front of them teetering on high heels. She trips, shoots forward to break her fall on her date’s back, and in doing so she gives Jim his opportunity. The silver-haired man neatly sidesteps the off-kilter couple, and as he does so he brushes past Jim. Jim throws his weight just slightly to that side to prolong their contact and shoots his hand down into the murky space between their bodies. His fingertips brush the rich leather of the man’s coat, then the silky lining of his pocket. Then pay dirt--the corner of the man’s wallet and the crisp edge of the envelope he slid inside earlier. Time seems to slow. Jim breathes, straining with the tiniest of muscles, trying to coax his fine motor control into some kind of purchase without moving around too much and giving the whole thing away. And then suddenly, magically, the wallet is in his hand. His hand feels like it’s suspended in the soft dark of the man’s pocket, touching neither its sides nor the man’s body. Jim starts to pull back--all he needs to do is get clear, get it into his own pocket and get the hell out of here. 

It doesn’t happen like that. 

A hand brushes Jim’s wrist, fingers searching idly like you might brush away a crawling insect without really looking at it. But, finding a stranger’s hand most of the way in his pocket engenders a slightly more conscious response. The man takes hold of Jim’s wrist so strongly that he knows immediately he has no hope of escape, his tendons pinned uselessly, his fingers limp. The man takes his wallet back, shoves it into the other pocket. Jim cringes, imagining the alarm about to be raised. He hopes Gaila hears about it soon, doesn’t waste time hoping. He wonders if they’ll send him back to Vulcan, or if there’s somewhere worse. 

But the man says nothing, just drags Jim after him onto the street and down it until they’re well clear of the throng at the door. Then the man whirls to face Jim, or rather manouvres Jim’s body into position so they’re face to face, the motion slightly more controlled than a yank. 

“Ow,” Jim says, unable to bite back the protest. 

“That hurt? I’m so sorry,” the man says.

“What the fuck, man. You calling the Guard or what?” 

“How about you tell me a couple of things, before I figure out which way this is going to play? One, why have you been eyeballing me for the last hour? And two, who sent you?” 

“Sent me? What are you talking about? Look, you’ve got this all wrong. I’m nobody. I’m the furthest thing from somebody--I was just trying to jack your wallet, okay?” 

“Bull _shit_. Now tell me who the hell sent you.” 

The man does yank this time, and Jim’s body jerks what feels like an inch from the man’s face. Jim’s starting to think his best case scenario is going to involve a broken wrist at the very least when the man freezes like a deer caught on the highway. There’s no sound; the street noise has faded to the imagined thud of Jim’s heart and the rasp of the man’s breath, hot on Jim’s cheek. 

“What’s your name?” the man asks. 

Of all the questions. Shit, of all the questions, Jim has no idea how to answer this one. Kevin, Sam, hell, he might call himself Spock if it sounded remotely plausible, but he can’t make his brain make his mouth work. He moves it dumbly like he’s chewing a fat wad of tobacco leaf. 

“Don’t screw with me, son,” the man says. “What’s your real name? What was your name before...before anything happened to you?” 

Jim swallows. His mouth stings, dry like it’s full of sand. Jim opens it again and lets his name spill out. 

“Jim Kirk,” he says, and the man lets go.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The curious agitation he feels now seems to be perpetual these days. He cannot point to its exact genesis; the state seems to have crept into his bones, deposited with the minerals that comprise them. He supposes it has been building since he was born, or perhaps just since the Romulans came to Vulcan. But Spock has grown tired of giving them the blame--or the credit--for everything._

San Francisco, fifteen years later

Spock is not tired.

His lack of physical fatigue should be unusual at the end of a beta shift beat, but the curious agitation he feels now seems to be perpetual these days. He cannot point to its exact genesis; the state seems to have crept into his bones, deposited with the minerals that comprise them. He supposes it has been building since he was born, or perhaps just since the Romulans came to Vulcan. But Spock has grown tired of giving them the blame--or the credit--for everything. 

Tonight has been slow. The usual drunks, some of whom have come to know him by name; an addict shivering in an alley who required medevac; two armed robberies complete with two unregistered disruptors ditched at the scene once the thieves got what they were after. Spock has a feeling the filed-off serials on the abandoned weapons were once a match for missing armament, but bringing this up with the quartermaster will earn him an eyeroll and a shrug at most. 

So, yes: all in all, a slow night. For this, Spock is grateful. He returns to his vee, enters the keycode, and programs the car’s internal AI to return to the station before clocking out and shutting the door behind him. The station at nearly 0200 is a singularly depressing place, the night shift milling around a pot of stale coffee and waiting for something to happen. No, the station is the last place Spock wishes to go. Although perhaps that is not strictly true--he has even less desire to return home. 

The vee turns itself on and hums busily around the corner, and Spock turns his collar up against the cool air. His beat tonight put him near the wharf; there is an entertainment district nearby Spock has not frequented before but which seems as good a place as any to assuage the itch beneath his skin. He walks, as he’s walked much of tonight already. Night shifts are unpopular, but Spock has come to prefer them. He has no conflicting interests, and over the years he’s come to find his decisions are more likely to be his own after-hours, while the Commanders sleep. As a rule, Spock prefers begging forgiveness to asking permission. 

He walks, leaving the dark wash of the bay at his back. Once, Spock knows, there would have been a bridge behind him too, but it’s long gone. The Empire always did like to make a statement. Eventually the lonely sidewalks become populated. First come pairs and threesomes, ambling in the loose-limbed mode of the inebriated. Within the span of a few city blocks, Spock finds himself in a veritable crowd. He recalls that tomorrow is a day of leisure for the majority of the city’s working population, and the citizens are behaving accordingly. Spock’s last leave period was three weeks previous; he supposes he should put in for the next, if only to attend to those errands better accomplished during regular business hours. Additionally, his quarters have fallen somewhat into disrepair and could do with a protracted cleaning session. 

Spock has grown increasingly self-indulgent in his off-duty hours. Once, he would have felt shame for such decadence, but not now. 

The club Spock selects is not one he has visited before, although he is familiar with its ilk from nights in other parts of the city, other sprawling buildings with warrens of rooms he’d be perfectly content never to view in daylight. He ducks inside and finds himself in a coatroom, at the front of which is a booth inhabited by a young Andorian woman, dressed in something fittingly tight and black. She smiles down at her comm, but her smile fades as she looks up and notices Spock. He’s hardly the first Romulan to slum it in a _Terrhasu_ club, but that clearly doesn’t mean she has to appreciate his presence. 

“ID,” she says flatly. 

Spock hands it over, along with his credit chip. She scans them both, pursing her lips as his information appears on her console. 

“Evening, Centurion,” she says, saluting with no small degree of insouciance. Spock could bring her in for insubordination, and she knows it. A peculiar kind of bravery, he thinks, but one the inhabitants of this planet--human or not-- seem possessed of in spades. 

“At ease, citizen,” Spock says crisply. “I am off-duty at present.” 

“If you feel like keeping the uniform on, I’m sure you can find someone who’s into that,” she says. 

“I am afraid my tastes run rather more to the egalitarian.” 

She sniffs. “In your downtime, maybe.” 

Spock holds out his hand for his credit chip and ID card. She drops them into his cupped palm, pointedly avoiding contact. The gesture is unsubtle and impolite, but as it serves Spock’s purposes he does not comment. He pockets the chip and ID and proceeds to one of the coat room’s private lockers, where he divests himself of his uniform jacket and tunic, leaving only his black short-sleeved undershirt. The black fabric of the right sleeve meets the black of Spock’s inked right arm and flows solidly down to the crisp line at his wrist. Spock finds the asymmetry paradoxically pleasing. He stows his clothing neatly in the locker and leans in for the retinal scanner. 

The Andorian watches him, quirking an antenna at him. “Egalitarian,” she mutters under her breath. 

Spock shuts his locker, walks the length of the coatroom, and steps out into the writhing dark. 

He makes his way to the bar and orders a drink, neat whiskey. He cups his hands around it, fingers still stiff and cold from outside. The cut glass tumbler isn’t warm, but it could be, the way the liquid glows amber in the low lights suspended overhead. He raises the glass to his lips and takes a drink, and then there’s the warmth, blooming in his mouth and slipping down his throat to coalesce in his chest. Spock closes his eyes and allows himself a moment of sensory pleasure, pretending however briefly that the moment will be a solitary one, that he will not take another sip and then another, finish his drink and order a second. When Spock reflects that he has grown self-indulgent, this is what he means. 

The venue Spock has chosen is not one of the barely legal skin clubs frequented by certain Romulans, including Spock’s co-workers on occasion. This establishment at least maintains the veneer of respectability, though in such an expansive structure one cannot possibly monitor or illuminate all corners. So Spock will wait and drink and eventually locate a partner with whom to adjourn to one of said corners, or perhaps to an alternate location. 

He shouldn’t be here. He should have returned home immediately following the conclusion of his shift, and perhaps he would have were it not for the creeping wakefulness that does not abate until Spock succumbs to unconsciousness by dint of sheer physical exhaustion. He has found both orgasm and inebriation helpful in achieving this state. And so, Spock waits. He does not have to wait long. 

He’s midway into his second glass of whiskey when he feels a warning tingle just over his shoulder, followed by a voice thick with drink and warm at Spock’s ear. 

“Looking for love in all the wrong places?” the voice asks teasingly. 

“Love seems a somewhat optimistic proposition this evening,” Spock replies, and the man behind him laughs. 

“You might be right,” he says, reaching up to trace the pinna of Spock’s ear. “Hmm,” he says. “I don’t usually fuck pointy-ears.” 

Spock can’t prevent his intake of breath at the profanity or the thrill of desire it provokes, despite the inherent xenophobia in the rest of the man’s statement. Spock cranes his neck away and the man takes notice, chasing it with his mouth. “That’s interesting,” says Spock. “Neither do I.” 

“You into xeno or something?” 

“Or something,” Spock says tonelessly, hoping to draw interest away from his ill-advised honesty. The man finds his way back to Spock’s ear, nibbling at the lobe. He snakes his arms around Spock’s waist. Spock is the taller and thinner of the two, if the breadth of the man’s arms is any indication. He doesn’t appear overly musclebound, simply strong, solid. His arms are dusted with golden hair, and his hands...his hands are most pleasing. 

_Yes_ , Spock thinks. _A satisfactory turn of events, indeed._

“There’s just something about you, though,” says the man. “And hey, rules are made to be broken, right?” 

“I suppose,” says Spock, “That there is a time and place for everything.” 

The man smiles against Spock’s cheek. “You wanna find someplace a little more...out of the way?” 

“Please.” 

Spock downs the remainder of his drink and glances quickly back at the man, just long enough to see fair hair to match that on his arms, strong features, full lips. Spock would not characterize himself as strictly picky, but he has his preferences. As he declared earlier, however, chief among them is that his partners not be Romulan. Before Spock can deflect, the man grabs for his hand and pulls him into the crowd. He tenses, then follows. His shields are, as the humans say, rusty; he has long since become accustomed to shielding via avoidance of physical contact. Before he employs them now he is met with a wave of desire and excitement that he frankly finds infectious, so that when the man leads them to a cushioned chaise in a dim and lightly-travelled section of the club Spock arrives with the ghost of a smile on his lips. Emotional transference, obviously. 

He wastes no time in straddling the man’s lap, pinning him to the back of the chair with an arm across his chest. This man may be strong, but Spock is stronger. The man knows it, even revels in it. His eyes close and he lets his head loll back onto the cushions, his mouth parting invitingly. Spock leans in and kisses him, not bothering with softness or care, taking hold of the man’s face with his free hand and holding him steady as he kisses as deeply as he likes. The man frees his arms from beneath Spock’s and wraps them around his waist again, grinding Spock down into his lap, and if Spock wasn’t hard before he’s certainly getting there now. 

“Fuck,” the man says when they part. “I have a feeling things are going to get really illegal really fast if we stick around here.” 

“Yes,” Spock pants, wanting very much to return to kissing. Preferably divested of their clothing. 

“You got a place around here?” 

Spock shakes his head no. “My apartment is...inconvenient.” He never brings them back to his; he rarely leaves with them at all, but the thump of Spock’s heart in his side and the way his blood pounds through his veins with this man between his thighs...Spock isn’t about to pass this one up. 

“Fuck it, fine,” the man says. “We can go to mine. Just--” He sits up and kisses Spock again, nipping at his bottom lip. “I wanted to do that again.” 

“If we don’t leave now, I will not be held responsible for my actions,” Spock says. 

The man laughs. “Okay, okay. Enthusiasm, I like that in my benevolent overlords. You have stuff at the coat check?” 

The judgemental Andorian is nowhere to be found, much to Spock’s relief. He had been disinclined to hear her opinion of the evening’s apparent conclusion. He bends down to the scanner and opens his locker, stuffing his uniform jacket under his arm. Outside, the waning night is cool, but Spock doesn’t put the jacket on. 

The man looks askance at his bare arms, eyes widening slightly as he takes in the tattoo in better light. “You’re not cold?” Then he shakes his head, as if aware that such concern is perhaps misplaced in a casual sexual encounter. “My bike’s locked up this way.” 

He leads Spock partway down an alley, where a dangerous-looking motorcycle--clearly an antique--is locked to a pipe with a relatively low-tech but menacing length of chain. Spock raises an eyebrow. 

“Thieves these days hack digital locks,” the man explains. “Nobody carries around a good old handsaw anymore. Plus, lo-fi, you know. Goes with the whole aesthetic.” He gives Spock a long look, and something pricks at Spock’s mind. 

The man steps closer, and Spock has the sudden urge to take a corresponding step back. “You…” The man shakes his head. “You look familiar. Maybe it’s just the light. What did you say your name was?” 

“I didn’t,” Spock says, and if his mouth is dry it is surely only a consequence of the alcohol.

“I mean, I’m going to need to know what to moan later, right?” 

The man grins lasciviously, and Spock might roll his eyes were he not so preoccupied with devising a pseudonym. He does not give his true identity during these encounters; revealing that Centurion Spock of the Imperial Guard passes his time fucking _Terrhasu_ and worse seems unwise at best. However, while Spock considers himself an honorable man, he is not above small acts of petty revenge. A failing on his part, to be sure. Perhaps one day he will see fit to correct it, but today is not that day. He is unsure where his old colleague from the prison colony resides now; when last they parted one of them was bound for the War College and the other for a tour of duty fishing drunks out of the canals on DeLeeuw’s World. So if rumor should circulate that a certain member of the Praetorate frequents unsavory Terran nightclubs and beds their denizens, Spock cannot bring himself to feel much regret. 

“My name is Jarok,” he says. 

The man’s face goes slack with shock, and that’s when Spock remembers. 

“No,” the man says. “No, you’re not him. You can’t be. You’re--” He steps closer, seizing Spock about the shoulders and peering into his face. _“Spock?”_

“Jim?” Spock blinks, attempting to reconcile the man before him--the man Spock can still taste--with the coltish, angry 06119, the only prisoner on Vulcan he’d known by name. 

“Oh my god, it is you!” Jim smiles, an impossibly wide smile that seems to involve his entire body. “I can’t believe it, I thought I’d never--” 

Belatedly, he seems to realize he is still clutching Spock, and he lets go, gaze falling again to Spock’s arm. Then he looks down at his feet, and Spock cannot see clearly in the low light, but were he inclined to bet he would put credits on the fact that he is blushing. Spock finds himself dangerously close to doing the same. 

“You left,” he says simply. “We searched for you for a week; we found nothing. We gave you up for dead. We assumed you wouldn’t make it past the border guard.” 

Jim’s smile has faded. “I did,” he says. “Well, obviously.” 

“I am pleased,” Spock says. He is, genuinely so. The idea should surprise him, but it doesn’t. 

“You still in the Guard?” Jim asks, crossing his arms over his chest. 

Spock nods. “Yes.” He holds up his jacket and shrugs into it. There is little point to obfuscating now, and he’s growing chilled. He fingers the rank insignia on the jacket’s shoulders. 

“Centurion,” Jim says. “Nice work.” His tone is not complimentary, and it leaves Spock cold inside as well as out. It occurs to him that he and Jim have grown into natural enemies, if indeed they were ever anything else. 

“Well, I guess this isn’t happening,” Jim says, gesturing between them. 

Spock’s first inclination is to argue the point. Which is ludicrous, but there it is. “Jim--” 

“Come on,” Jim says. “I’m not that big an idiot. And I’m a fugitive from justice, right? You should probably maintain some plausible deniability here.” 

“That would be the wiser choice,” Spock says. 

“Yeah,” Jim says. “And look, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t give you my comm number. Not that it’s not good to see you. Just...all things considered, it seems best if we lose each other again.” He’s looking at the ground. Spock can see him chewing on his lower lip, can see his jaw working, the light playing over his skin. 

Lose. Spock supposes that Jim is using the word to mean purposeful evasion, but its other, less deliberate meaning hangs heavy in Spock’s mind. _Misplaced sentimentalism,_ he thinks. _You were but his jailor. Fifteen years of whatever life he has built himself and fifteen minutes of sexual chemistry cannot combine to obliterate that._

“You are correct,” Spock says. He fastens his jacket, turns the collar up against the night air. 

“Well,” Jim says. “I guess this is it. I...it always bothered me before, you know? You were...you were good to me on Vulcan, and you didn’t have to be. I wished I could have said goodbye.” 

He steps closer, and Spock briefly flashes back to the interior of the club. It is singularly illogical to regret the revelation of their identities, so he doesn’t. Does he? 

Jim leans in and kisses Spock’s cheek. “Bye, Spock,” he says. 

Then he turns away, kneeling down beside his bike to fiddle with the lock. At his side, the fingers of Spock’s right hand part in a gesture he has not used for over half his life. “Goodbye, Jim,” Spock calls to Jim’s back. Jim turns partway around, and Spock thinks he may be smiling. 

Spock walks away, because there is nothing else to do. Behind him, the bike roars to life and then dies away again as it carries Jim off into the night. 

_Live long and prosper,_ Spock thinks as he goes. He returns to his apartment. He is both sexually unsatisfied and sober, but he finds sleep takes him quickly regardless. When he awakens, he cannot remember his dreams. Late morning light streams into Spock’s windows and he feels somehow irrevocably changed. He stares at the ceiling for seven minutes and twenty-two seconds, attempting to assimilate the events of the previous night. Perhaps, he concludes, he is better off not making the attempt.

He rises and dresses for exercise. The morning is cool and foggy, which Spock has learned will cause him discomfort until approximately three miles into his run but will feel temperate by the time he’s finished. Typically, physical exercise tempers Spock’s emotions, soothing his nervous system into a state of erstwhile calm. Today, however, the elevation of his heart rate and the onset of perspiration serve only to remind Spock of Jim. Jim, pressed under him on the chaise at the club, the way he writhed and arched beneath the weight of Spock’s body. He shakes his head as if he could dispel the images, but his efforts prove fruitless. Eventually, Spock slows his pace. His running route takes him along the bay, where he leans heavily on a low wall and stares out into the fog. 

_Nothing has changed_ , Spock thinks. Nothing is different about today compared to yesterday. He has become aware of one less death in a life full of them, and if he still suffers from what has become a chronic state of physical agitation, that issue exists independently of his knowledge of Jim’s existence. Nonetheless, he returns home having failed at meditation and feeling the worse for it. He strips off his clothing and drops it into the ‘cycler, stepping into the shower and hesitating over the controls before selecting water instead of his usual sonics. If he is not careful, the excess water use will show up in his records, but he cannot bring himself to care about it now. He leans forward and rests his forehead against the slick shower wall. Behind his eyes, Jim’s face plays like a holo set on a loop, mouth opening, tongue running over his lips in invitation. Spock allows his mind to wander to thoughts of what might have been, had he selected a different alias. Jim’s body, pliant and responsive, the sounds that might have spilled from that mouth in the dark...Spock lets his hand drop to palm himself, idly at first but then with purpose, and when he comes over his own hand like an adolescent he marvels at the name on his lips. 

***

Spock arrives at the station early for his shift to find it in somewhat of an uproar. 

“Good,” says his supervisor Arel when she sees him. “We can use you.” She’s hunched over a PADD, scrolling through what look like official dossiers. 

“Pardon?” 

“We have just received word,” she says. “The Senate is sending a delegation.” 

“Here? To Terra?” Spock is incredulous. The Senate’s presence on Terra has been nominal at best since the initial occupation. Romulus prefers to admire her prizes from afar, minus the obligatory infrastructure keeping the planet in line. The Terran resistance has only kept them further afield; at least five years have passed since the last official visit, and that was before the incident in Toronto. Spock wonders who this delegate has fallen afoul of to have received such an unfortunate assignment. A junior senator, most likely. 

Terra, like Vulcan, was a symbolic victory for the Empire, the only difference being that the humans had pillaged their own planet before Romulus had a chance. At times, Spock finds himself wishing Vulcan had done the same, that his people’s endless stewardship of their home hadn’t been for naught. If someone was going to gut the planet, better it be her rightful denizens. 

“Spock? Have you listened to a word I’ve said?” Arel is staring at him. 

Spock shakes his head. “I am sorry,” he says. “I didn’t sleep well last night.” 

Arel rolls her eyes. “You should be a bit less adventurous in your choice of venue,” she says. “Unless you like Vice breathing down your neck.” 

Spock coughs. “There is nothing illegal about patronizing a licensed establishment,” he says tightly. 

“Maybe not for a civilian,” Arel says. “But you should know by now that the Empire takes a somewhat narrow view of interspecies fraternization. I’m only saying. You’re lucky it’s me they came running to, not Virak or the Commander.” 

“My permanent record is hardly consequential,” Spock says. “I am unlikely to advance beyond this point.” He should not speak so frankly, even to Arel. He endangers her with his very words, and to the best of his knowledge she bears him no ill will.

Arel shrugs. “Even so.” She lowers her voice. “You never know what the Tal Shiar’s going to find interesting, and before you know it you’re on your back in an interrogation room staring down a cage of Centaurian slugs.” She shudders. “We should change the subject.” 

“Indeed.” Spock peers over her shoulder at the personnel files. “Have you been tasked with logistics?” 

“I have,” she says. “They’ll want a full protective detail.” She wrinkles her nose, a strikingly emotive gesture that Spock finds somewhat shocking despite his years among Arel’s people. “They don’t want to leave anything to chance. How would you characterize the current climate? You’re among the civilian population with greater frequency.” 

“I am unsure,” Spock says. “Following the...unpleasantness in Nairobi last year there was certainly an uptick in civilian unrest. It remained subtle here in the city, graffiti and the like. I believe Virak’s unit made arrests.” 

Arel nods. “They’re difficult to take measure of,” she says. “This resistance.” She says the word experimentally, as of she’s never heard it before. They call themselves Kelvin, after a starship destroyed in the early border wars. Spock’s fellows mock this name even as it infuriates them in its nebulous ability to appear seemingly anywhere with impunity, despite the Guard’s best efforts to the contrary. The more stringent the laws forbidding “reference to or encouragement of treason or acts deemed hostile to the Empire,” the more the name seems to be everywhere, on everyone’s lips, whispered at Spock’s back and shouted in crowds. 

_Remember the Kelvin!_

Spock is unsure he will ever forget it, just as he’ll never forget the first human rebel to spit in his face, muscles already clumsy from the neurotoxic grenades. Spock had wiped her saliva from his faceplate and dragged her into custody kicking and screaming. He doesn’t know where she is now, where any of them are. The Tal Shiar used to attempt re-education, but after the early protests and the mass arrests that followed, they abandoned their efforts and turned to brute force instead. Spock doesn’t know whether or not to deem them successful. There are fewer organized attacks, but those that do occur are larger in scale. Spock is not a member of the antiterror task force, but he hears enough to know that the situation is similar in all the major cities. 

He wonders idly what it meant to police such rebellion two thousand years ago, when one couldn’t simply wipe a city off the map, or threaten to. He wonders less idly why Terra differs so from Vulcan in her appetite for resistance, although he concedes that the critique inherent in such thoughts is rooted both in emotion and the unreliable memory of a child. If a Vulcan resistance existed, Spock was unaware of it. If his parents knew, they took the secret to their graves. 

Spock turns back to Arel. “When does the delegation arrive?” 

“Three days,” she says. “They are planning a tour of the continent, beginning with Temhruuhi.” 

_Temhruuhi_ : conquest. Spock thinks it likely that a similarly-renamed city exists on each world subsumed by the Empire. Possibly more than one. The city formerly known as San Francisco is the symbolic jewel in the Empire’s crown, nevermind the fact that there is little to be gained and everything to be lost in terms of the city’s drain on personnel and resources. But voicing such thoughts would guarantee Spock an audience with the Tal Shiar, so he keeps his head down and attempts to keep the peace to the best of his abilities. 

“I’m appointing you head of the security forces,” Arel says. 

Spock whirls to face her, heart pounding in his side. “Arel--”

“Unless you have an objection?” 

“I do not, however--” 

“Then do not question me, Centurion. I’m not entirely sure why, but I find that I trust you over the rest of this department. You’re the only one who doesn’t seem to want my head on a platter. Now, I’ve forwarded you a list of available officers. Please have your team selected and vetted by Gamma shift tomorrow.” 

She gathers up her PADD and an overfull mug of coffee and turns to go. “I’ve got a meeting,” she says over her shoulder. 

Spock raises an eyebrow. “How can you be so certain?” he calls after her. 

“I cannot,” she says, clearly understanding the more specific question he cannot voice in earshot of the crowded room. “I believe the humans call it a hunch.” 

Spock uses the time left before he begins his shift in earnest to review the names Arel sent him. Later, he will cross-reference the databases at his highest level of clearance and note any concerning personal histories, anything that might recommend against an officer’s appointment. Now, however, he is on duty. He locates his assigned vee in the garage and keys in his ID code, unable to stifle a sigh as the vehicle powers on and the AI comes online. 

_Centurion Spock, ID 34875 TL. Greetings, Centurion._

“Greetings,” Spock replies. 

He swallows. He is still unused to conversing with his vehicle as if it were a sentient partner. His previous assignments wanted for equipment, but Terra is a proving ground for new tech as well as new officers. Spock, however, is neither new nor on trial, despite the fact that some might consider Arel’s assignment a test. 

Tonight, Spock is assigned to patrol City Sector 6A. He rotates through sectors on a routine basis, and he has not seen 6A in nearly a month. He has not missed it. Sector 6A has become notorious during Spock’s tenure on Terra; the _isha_ houses sprawling along the streets like a fungus, starting with a group of nodding users in a single apartment and creeping forth from the rotting hearts of old Terran buildings until their cavernous warrens reach the street to beckon others inside. To hear Spock’s fellow officers speak of it, the drug is a human blight infecting the _Rihannsu_ as might an opportunistic strain of virus, but Spock has his doubts. It’s become fashionable among a certain class of well-to-do Romulan youth to tour the _isha_ houses like they’re wine tasting on Tauri III, and these dabblers cannot tolerate the drugs nearly as well as the addicts can. Over the past three months Spock’s division has come across five bodies dumped in the vicinity, all Romulan and all under the age of thirty, abandoned by their companions after succumbing to a drug-induced stupor from which they wouldl never emerge.

Spock starts on the outskirts of the _isha_ district, parking his vee just at the tideline where the warehouses—legitimate businesses during the day, locked up tight now—grow increasingly derelict and ebb into the squatter’s shanties that make up the bulk of 6A and render it such a challenging assignment. These are whole worlds, Spock thinks, that he will never be able to take measure of. There are beings here who will live out the entirety of their short lives within 6A. He has heard rumors of infants left on the hoods of Guard vees, found blinking into the grey dawn at shift’s end. The vee’s AI sets about locking itself down such that anyone without Spock’s ID (or his eyes, Spock thinks grimly) will find themselves unable to gain entry with any implement save perhaps a high-grade explosive device. Even then, the AI is liable to self-destruct, possibly out of spite.

Spock leaves the vee behind and walks north, well aware of the sidearm heavy at his hip. He’s gained something of a reputation for talking his way out of corners, much to the chagrin of his fellows. Virak in particular finds Spock’s strategic deployment of violence frustrating at best and nigh sacrilegious at worst. Spock recalls Arel’s earlier admonition. Virak or vice, the proverbial rock and a hard place. Virak makes no secret of his general distaste for Spock, or of the way his personal issues occasionally seem to morph into suspicion. He reminds Spock of Jarok. Perhaps he should have used Virak’s name with Jim, though few things could be more foolish if his repeated patronage of the clubs is indeed being monitored.

Halfway down a long city block, Spock’s comm crackles to life. A call for backup, requested at the border between 6A and 6B; Spock is almost certainly the nearest officer to the scene and is also just far enough from his vee to make pedestrian travel the more expeditious option. He breaks into a run, a good clip just shy of a sprint, his muscles not quite allowing him to forget the morning’s efforts. When he skids to a halt at the given coordinates, he finds three figures together on the sidewalk, bathed in the greenish light of the streetlamp as if in a tableau. Spock catalogues them by order of importance. 

Firstly: On the ground lies a pale figure, female and Romulan, her dark hair spilling over the concrete like blood. There’s a tendril of actual blood roaming south from her right nostril, and the fossa of her arm is marred by a verdant abscess, the result of too many needle punctures in far less than sterile conditions. She’s not breathing, Spock notes, but she’s also not dead. Not yet, anyway; her body isn’t stiff and cold or stinking and fetid like the other ODs Spock has seen in the district. 

Secondly, and pertinent to the girl’s continued grasp on life: There is a man crouched over her, a _Terrhasu_. He is sweating and cursing and pumping at her side with both hands. 

Thirdly, there is Terok, a _duhlan_ Spock recognizes from the station. He is one of Virak’s, and thus likely distrusts Spock on sight. His disruptor is trained on the human, and the hand that holds it is shaking. He is young, Spock thinks. Young and stupid. 

“Report,” Spock says to him.

“I was on patrol,” Terok says. “I heard a scream and came running, and I found this _Terrhasu_ rat assaulting the girl here.” 

“Assaulting my ass,” the man says from his berth at the unconscious girl’s side. “I’m saving her life. Or trying to, with no help from _him._ ” 

“Get your hands off of her,” Terok spits, probably for Spock’s benefit. “In the name of the Empire.” 

For the second time in as many days, Spock stifles the urge to roll his eyes. “Call for medevac,” he says. 

“But--” 

“Do it.” Terok glowers, but he gets out his communicator. Spock steps closer to the human.  
“Your identity chip, please,” he says. 

The man huffs a laugh, unceasing in his movements over the girl. “You taking over for me? Cause I ain’t stopping compressions to fish around for ID.” 

“Will she live?” 

“Dunno,” says the man. “Depends how long your medevac takes. When I was working medevac we had the best response times on the force, but that was before you booted all the ‘outworlders.’ Never mind the fact it’s our goddamn planet in the first place.” 

As Spock watches, the man presses an early-model medical tricorder to the girl’s body and presses a button. “Get clear, dammit,” the man says, and a moment later the girl jolts with shock. 

“He is assaulting her with a deadly weapon,” Terok says, his voice tremulous. 

“A tricorder with a defibrillator attachment,” Spock says. 

The man looks up at him, eyes narrowing. “Exactly,” he says. “And maybe Junior over there would know what the hell he was looking at if I wasn’t stuck with whatever relics I can scrounge up on the black market. This thing belongs in a museum, for chrissakes. It’s practically pre-warp.” 

Now Spock does roll his eyes. “You have admitted to several actionable offenses in the past five minutes, as well as engaged in speech deemed hostile to the Empire,” he says crisply. “I would advise against continuing to press your luck.” 

Spock might not have Terok’s trigger finger, but he is, after all, an officer of the law. 

“Hmmph,” says the man. 

He frowns at the tricorder. Then: “Ha!” he crows triumphantly. “I’ve got a pulse. Thready, but it’s there. Now where the hell’s your ambuvee?” 

As he speaks, the girl spasms, drawing a heaving and watery breath. The human rolls her onto her side just in time for her to vomit a quantity of foamy, yellowish liquid over the sidewalk. The man scrapes her hair back from her forehead with a bearing that is very nearly tender. 

“Step away from her,” Terok says. 

“Hold your horses,” the man mutters. 

Spock hears the whine of a charging disruptor and wagers that Terok will do no such thing.

“I’m going to arrest him, Centurion,” Terok says. 

“And you require your weapon to do so why, exactly?” 

“He is clearly dangerous,” Terok says. “And we are still uncertain of the exact circumstances surrounding his encounter with the girl.” 

“Dangerous or not, I just saved one of your people,” the man says. “Surely that warrants some consideration.” He’s gotten up now, and stands with his arms crossed over his chest. The tricorder hangs at his hip. 

Spock purses his lips. “Perhaps,” he says. 

Terok boggles. “Perhaps? Centurion, please. Virak would--” 

“Subcommander Virak, _duhlan_. You forget yourself.” 

Terok’s expression is thunderous, and Spock will almost certainly hear about this later, but he can’t bring himself to care. 

“What _were_ you doing in 6B at this hour, citizen?” Spock asks. He wouldn’t be surprised if the man was himself an addict. _Isha_ seeps from the drug districts like smoke. There are those in the Guard who indulge on occasion; Spock has heard too many stories of contraband disappearing from the evidence lockers at Central Command for all of them to be mere rumors. 

“Look around you,” the man says. “You think every one of these rat traps isn’t chock full of people who don’t have the credits to pay for one of your damned Imperial Clinics? And that’s if they’ll even see human patients, which half the time they won’t. Somebody’s got to patch the poor bastards up.” 

“Do you have a medical license?” 

“Don’t be obtuse, _Centurion,_ ” the man says. “You think I had a whole lot of time to dick around in med school after you sons of bitches blew half of Earth to smithereens?”

There’s a blur of movement as Terok pushes past Spock and shoves his disruptor in the man’s face. “That’s enough,” he spits. 

For his part, the human man looks murderous. He appears to be contemplating a head butt. Spock thinks that course of action ill-advised if he wishes to keep his skull intact. 

“Terok,” Spock says warningly. “Stand down. That’s an order.” 

“Centurion, every word out of this _Terrhasu_ dog’s mouth has been treasonous filth,” Terok says. “Why do you not arrest him?” He looks at Spock dangerously. “Perhaps Subcommander Virak is right when he says you have your own agenda,” he says. “Perhaps--” 

“You are insubordinate,” Spock snaps. Terok doesn’t hear him. The medevac has arrived, sirens blaring. The ambuvee’s lights oscillate over the crumbling facades on either side of the street. Spock thinks he sees a pale face at one of the windows, but in the space of a blink, it’s gone. 

And in the ensuing chaos, so is the human. He ducks neatly beneath a distracted Terok’s disruptor and disappears into the darkness between buildings, and if Spock declines to give chase...well. This isn’t technically his beat, anyway. 

***

The following evening, the olive-toned circles under Arel’s eyes are deeper than usual. Spock knows instantly that he is the cause. 

“Subcommander,” he says, inclining his head deferentially. He proffers a cup of coffee, which Arel takes with a distinct air of entitlement. 

“Centurion, this is but a drop in the bucket of what you owe me after the meeting I just sat through.” 

“My apologies, Subcommander.”

“Apologies,” she says. “You are so quick to offer them to me, yet you wouldn’t apologize to that whelp Terok if it would save you from an entire vat of Centaurian slugs.” 

Spock swallows. “No, Subcommander.” 

“Excellent. That’s what I just told Subcommander Virak. I’m pleased you aren’t making me a liar on top of everything else.” 

“Arel--” 

She holds up a hand. “Don’t worry,” she says. “The savage beast has been soothed, for now anyway. But I do have to ask: what in the name of the Elements did you do to irk him so? The man’s half convinced you’re some sort of blood traitor.” 

It is only by virtue of Spock’s somewhat tenuous controls that he manages not to boggle openly at the words. As it is, he feels his face drain of color. Hastily, he obscures it with his own cup of coffee, the liquid scalding and acrid on his tongue. 

But Arel is eminently observant, and doesn’t miss his reaction. “Spock? Are you well?” 

He nods, forcing down his burning mouthful. “I may be taking ill,” he says. “A virus, perhaps.” 

“You can’t be sick,” she says. “That’s an order. I need you functioning at one hundred percent until this state visit is over. Then you may waste away and die or burn up with fever or whichever ailment suits you best. But not until Senator Jarok’s delegation has left the city.” 

Spock blinks. He would think it impossible, but after the previous days’ events he can only shake his head, absorbing this latest painful irony as he has a thousand other small cruelties. He thinks his bones must be riddled with them by now. Do they weaken his foundations, he wonders? Or is he bolstered by weathering such storms, shored up like a limping shuttle’s patched hull? 

“Maybe you should sit,” Arel says. “Finish your coffee and then we’ll go over the security reports on your team.” She moves to take his arm, but he steps out of her way as quickly as he can. Too quickly, as it turns out, for he staggers against the table. 

Spock finds his chair and sits, but he lets his coffee go cold. 

***

His shift that night is blessedly uneventful, and at its close Spock again finds himself at a loss. He was not strictly obfuscating in front of Arel earlier--he fears he may, in fact, be coming down with something. His throat feels faintly scratchy, and his neck aches if he moves at a particular ankle. He palpates his cool skin, running the pads of his fingers from his jawline to his clavicle. Perhaps a faint swelling. Unilateral. He should visit the clinic, but it won’t open until morning. 

He’s near the Terran nightclub again, if he’s feeling self-destructive. However, the thought of Arel brings him up short. She has been inordinately accommodating of the strange grudge Virak bears him. Factionalism is a time-honored Imperial tradition, and Arel is at risk just as much as Spock. More so, for she has the reputation of her controversial Centurion to manage along with her own, and the former has a marked effect on the later. She was correct tonight, Spock thinks, when she said he owed her more than coffee. He doubts he will ever be able to repay her fully. 

Of course, he has selfish reasons for balking at the thought of returning to the club. He wonders if, elsewhere in the night, Jim has the same hesitation. Spock should have ascertained the frequency with which Jim patronizes the establishment. He could even have worked it into his efforts at seduction. 

_Come here often?_  
But he didn’t, and now he supposes he should both honor Jim’s wish not to see him again and his own desire not to be caught up in the churning center of a vice inquiry. He is faintly aware that he should be disturbed that the former is the greater motivator. 

Lacking anything better to do, Spock goes home. His quarters are spartan, but they are his own; his rank has finally outstripped the necessity of shared housing and for this Spock is immensely grateful. He feels weary and wired both, unable to differentiate mental fatigue from physical. He decides to split the difference, and does a short regimen of calisthenics in the middle of the sitting room, stopping when sweat beads at his brow. After the sonics he sits at his desk and reviews security briefings until his eyelids grow heavy. The delegation from Romulus arrives tomorrow. Spock has been relieved of patrol duties for the duration of the state visit. Tomorrow afternoon he will attend the senator’s official address to the citizens of _Temhruuhi_ , tomorrow night the state dinner and accompanying entertainments, and he will attempt to stay as far away from the man he is sworn to protect as is possible. 

In bed, he allows his thoughts to turn towards the prurient. This time, he does not play at surprise or shame when Jim’s face swims into his mind’s eye, when his imagination roams back to the low and throbbing lights of the nightclub. Jim’s body beneath his, hard in the tight denim he wore. Spock should have thrown caution to the winds that night, and damn vice to the Elements. He has long ago abandoned the pipe dream of total emotional control. Still, he avoids miring himself in unbecoming feelings, self-pity chief among them. But supine on the mattress, he finds he is filled with it; it gnaws blackly at his heart and makes him want to claw at things. But he’s clawed all his life, hasn’t he? And here was something that, for once, had come easily. He deserved it, he deserved it. 

A sound escapes from Spock’s throat, a moan of want, and he imagines the flare of arousal in Jim’s eyes upon hearing it. Spock slides his hand into his sleepwear and draws himself out, hissing as the head of his cock makes contact with his waistband. 

_Things are going to get illegal really fast if we don’t get out of here._

_Let them, Spock says._

_He presses Jim firmly against the back of the chair. He watches Jim’s adam’s apple bob as he swallows, watches him draw his tongue across his lips. Spock’s arm across his chest must make breathing difficult; the breaths Jim draws are shallow pants._

_There is a moment of hesitation, and Spock wonders if Jim has recognized him, if he is repulsed by their history, by Spock’s alien appearance and all that it implies. But just as swiftly the moment is gone, and Spock realizes that Jim already knows who he is. He knows, and he likes it. Spock reaches down and scratches lightly at the material covering Jim’s erection, tracing its length and breadth. Both of which are considerable, particularly given this is fantasy, but--_

_Spock, Jim says. Please._

Spock spreads himself wider, letting his fingers wander down. He thinks of Nalai, all those years ago. If things had been different, would they have learned each other slowly, fumblingly? Would Spock have been charmed, allowed Nalai to endear himself to him? Softness is not in Spock’s vocabulary; such is the consequence of a sexual awakening won in snatches, from patch to patch of darkness. 

When he comes he’s on Jim’s lap, legs slung across his body. He’s naked, and Jim is inside him, the flat of his hand a warmth at the small of Spock’s back. Spock shakes all over, his teeth chattering, and he bites the slick meat of his cheek to keep from crying out and against his chest Jim’s mouth is moving. 


End file.
